House Ethics Committee to consider sanctions for Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick on April 21

The House Ethics Committee will meet April 21 to vote on sanctions for U.S. Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, potentially including expulsion.

That means a meeting that could signal the end of the Miramar Democrat’s congressional career will take place just as Florida state lawmakers consider a map that could make her re-election virtually impossible.

The Ethics meeting is scheduled less than a month after an adjudicating panel affirmed 25 counts violating House rules, most in connection to allegations she siphoned millions in disaster relief funding to her congressional campaign account.

The meeting will mark the first time the 10 members of the evenly divided Ethics Committee will discuss the allegations publicly. But eight of those members were part of the Subcommittee that sat for an hourslong trial in the House on March 26.

Once the Committee votes on the most appropriate sanctions — which could include expelling the lawmaker from Congress — a vote heads to the House floor for consideration by the entire House.

U.S. Rep. Greg Steube, a Sarasota Republican, has already threatened to file an expulsion resolution if Cherfilus-McCormick does not resign.

In the Ethics trial, the flow of money detailed some $14 million in state funding paid to Trinity Health Care Services, a business she helped found. Investigators say that money ended up being directed to a series of contractors run by Cherfilus-McCormick and her family members.

That included $4.4 million sent to SCM Consulting, a business also run by Cherfilus-McCormick and bearing her initials in the name, per the trial findings. But hundreds of thousands were also sent to companies founded by her brother, sister and a close family friend.

Each of those companies and several other accounts ultimately donated money to Cherfilus-McCormick’s 2021 Special Election campaign for Congress, sometimes exceeding campaign finance limits, the trial found. Cherfilus-McCormick ultimately won the Democratic nomination in that race by just five votes.

The Congresswoman is also the subject of a federal criminal investigation because the state payments, part of an effort to deliver COVID vaccines in underserved communities, were actually being overpaid. In the most serious case, a missing decimal point led to a payment of more than $50,000, resulting in a $5 million check, investigators say.

Cherfilus-McCormick’s attorney, William Barzee, in the March Ethics trial said the money collected by the Democrat and used to self-fund her campaign was earned through a legal, but unsigned, profit-sharing agreement for the family business. And he asserted that a hearing on 27 ethical allegations threatened her Fifth Amendment right to remain silent while under criminal investigation.

Notably, Republicans hold just a 217-214 majority over Democrats, which has made leadership in both parties reluctant to push members to vacate their seats over ethical concerns.

The April 21 sanctions meeting will happen as the Florida Legislature meets for congressional redistricting. Gov. Ron DeSantis has urged lawmakers to approve cartography built on an assumption racial that majority-minority districts drawn in accordance with the Voting Rights Act will be deemed unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court soon.

That could mean a dismantling of Florida’s 20th Congressional District, which Cherfilus-McCormick now represents.