Dog Years and Dog Days for Ethics Reform

Political years must be like dog years, because the Democrats are acting as if 2006 is ancient history.

The sweeping Democratic victories in 2006 were based on perceived Republican failures on two fronts: 1. the war in Iraq and 2. corrupt and unethical behavior in Congress. The big stories were the rising violence in Baghdad and the string of congressional scandals starting with Rep. Tom DeLay, peaking with Jack Abramoff, and culminating with Rep. Mark Foley. In almost every congressional race, Democrats painted themselves as a viable alternative.

This week -- now -- the Democrats can take an important and much-needed step to address our broken ethics system by creating an independent Office of Congressional Ethics for Congress.

Or they can continue to pussyfoot around the idea, then attack it , and fall into the same trap that their Republican predecessors did: believing they can and should police themselves and trying to sell that to the public. We saw that, not more than 16 months ago. It. won't. work.

This is not solely on the Democrats -- after all, as our lobbyist pointed out, several Republicans acted like playground "thugs" this week to try to scare lawmakers off of ethics reform even as Rep. Rick Renzi (R-AZ) got served with 35 federal indictments for corruption -- but the Democrats have the most to lose. They can differentiate themselves from the Republican leaders who failed on ethics and create a Congress that sets a new standard for independent oversight... or, you know, just hope no one notices.

One other note: the Democrat-led Congress passed another important bill last summer, the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007 on lobbying and ethics. That was great, but having rules without effective enforcement is plain silly, which is why we need the current bill to pass, too.

No matter how much sense it might make, this will not happen unless they feel pressure from outside. They need to know we're watching--and that action matters more than campaign rhetoric. We're asking citizens to show them we ARE watching and we DO care by calling on our Representatives to clean up Congress, which you can do right here.

More on the merits of the independent Office of Congressional Ethics proposal below the fold.

This helpful fact sheet [PDF] describes the merits of the proposal, including:

Peer review simply is not the answer when it comes to a fair, firm process that ensures that Members live by the ethics rules on the books. Building on Common Cause's 1997 proposal, an Independent Ethics Commission would have two main functions. It would have the power to launch an investigation of an ethics complaint, or an allegation of an ethics impropriety, and then present its findings to the respective Ethics Committees of either the House or Senate. The committees would decide the final outcome of the investigation, either voting to take no action or to impose a range of penalties on the Member.

One common concern is that the lack of subpoena power means that the independent ethics panel would be toothless. That's not true. If the panel was unable to gain access to needed witnesses or documents, it would indicate in its report that the Ethics Committee should issue a subpoena. That report would eventually become public, and the press and public would know whether the Ethics Committee in fact issued the subpoena or not.

It'd be a big improvement over the status quo, which relies solely on members of Congress to police themselves. I could list out all the reasons -- Tom Delay, Jack Abramoff, William Jefferson, Rick Renzi, Duke Cunningham, more -- but that would take too long. You, me, and voters everywhere know that this matters and we need it. And if you haven't yet, please remind your congressperson.

Josh Zaharoff is the associate director of Common Cause's work on money in politics issues, focused primarily on public financing of campaigns.

Comments

[ryneduren]

RIght on target - ethics and campaign finance reform like texanna above is talking about never get through easily and there's always a lot of behind-the-scenes opposition. They never learn: the Dems when they got clobbered in 94, the Repubs when they lost Congress in 2006 -- Lesson #1, voters do not like scandals and corruption.

[texanna]

You know, most of the ethics problems in our Congress could be eliminated by having federally-financed elections for federal offices. If our representatives weren't having to raise so much money everyday, they might also have more time to address those issues they speak of so passionately during their campaigns. I mean, you don't ever hear any of them say "And, when I get to Washington I'm going to spend at least 6 hours a day raising money from anybody who'll give it to me so I can continue to tell you all the things you want to hear!"