Over the past week or two I’ve learned two things: do not tap your foot in the bathroom and that prudery is more prevalent on Capitol Hill than a true ethical fiber. Apparently it is more worrying that a Senator may be a deeply closeted gay man than it is that another Senator is deeply tied into a massive FBI-led corruption investigation or that a senior congressman is being investigated for perhaps the shadiest earmark ever. I read this article by Norm Ornstein today and couldn’t agree more with what he has to say. With so many corruption scandals, not just tawdry sex scandals, “Who believes that the ethics committee will act proactively to investigate allegedly scandalous behavior before stories garner headlines or result in announcements by prosecutors that Senators are targets or subjects of investigations?”

Washington is currently awash in cases of alleged ethical misconduct. From Rep. William Jefferson to Sen. Ted Stevens and Rep. Don Young there are over a dozen members who could have their cases investigated by a congressional ethics committee. As you can see from this video compilation created by Josh Marshall there is more than the enough for the ethics committees to choose from.

Of course, neither ethics committee actually does any investigating of ethics unless pushed by other members and even then it is unclear what can push an investigation to become meaningful. The one case, of all the cases that actually involve impropriety in the official actions of a Member, immediately referred to the Senate Ethics Committee was the case of Sen. Larry Craig. Personally, I can’t think of a single thing that Craig has done in violation of Senate Rules and therefore I don’t know why this case, as opposed to bribery investigations, is being referred to the Ethics Committee; although I can guess.

Sexual prudery rules on Capitol Hill, while true ethical misconduct goes unnoticed. Craig had his committee seats stripped within days after he was caught tapping his foot in a men’s bathroom. Sen. Stevens, under investigation for accepting bribes from Alaska oil execs, is still the ranking member of the Appropriations Committee, the most powerful committee in the Senate. Rep. Young, under investigation for trading earmarks for campaign contributions among other things, is still the ranking member of the Natural Resources Committee and the second-ranking member on the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, the very committee from which he inserted various earmarks that have caught the attention of the FBI.

From Fanne Fox to Larry Craig, Capitol Hill has been equally appalled and enthralled by political sex scandals. Maybe it’s time they get their priorities straight and focus on the real unethical muck going on behind doors in Congress and not bathroom doors in Minneapolis. It’s time for congressmen to stop pointing their noses up and instead point them down into some papers and get to investigating the actual problems in their own house.

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The Washington Post reports on a bipartisan effort in the House to ban a practice that Sunlight and citizen journalists investigated in 2006: How many members of Congress were using campaign contributions to pay their spouses, in essence putting special interest money into the family budget?

In the latest ripple of an ethics spat gripping Congress, the House yesterday passed a bipartisan bill that bans lawmakers from paying their spouses for campaign work.

The measure, passed on a voice vote, was sponsored by Reps. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) and Michael N. Castle (R-Del.). It would not bar other family members from working on a lawmaker’s campaign but would require disclosure.

Currently, spouses can work for campaigns provided that they charge fair market value for their services. The measure still has to passed by the Senate.

The meat of the bill is contained in these passages:

(1) PROHIBITING COMPENSATION OF SPOUSES- Notwithstanding any other provision of this Act, no authorized committee of a candidate or any other political committee established, maintained, or controlled by a candidate or an individual holding Federal office (other than a political committee of a political party) shall directly or indirectly compensate the spouse of the candidate or individual (as the case may be) for services provided to or on behalf of the committee.

(2) DISCLOSURE OF PAYMENTS TO SPOUSES AND IMMEDIATE FAMILY MEMBERS- In addition to any other information included in a report submitted under section 304 by a committee described in paragraph (1), the committee shall include in the report a separate statement of any payments, including direct or indirect compensation, made to the spouse or any immediate family member of the candidate or individual involved during the period covered by the report.

(3) IMMEDIATE FAMILY MEMBER DEFINED- In this subsection, the term `immediate family member’ means the son, daughter, son-in-law, daughter-in-law, mother, father, brother, sister, brother-in-law, sister-in-law, or grandchild of the candidate or individual involved.

I find it a little odd that “indirectly compensate” isn’t defined — I guess that the Federal Election Commission will determine what that means (if you’re married to a UPS lobbyist, does that mean your campaign can’t ship via UPS?). In any case, here’s Govtrack’s page on the bill.

Just an observation, but I’ve always thought that of the two practices, lobbying by a spouse or immediate family member is potentially far more corrupting — there’s no requirement for a lobbying firm to pay fair market value for the services of a member’s spouse or son or daughter. (See here for one example….)

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The Politico reports that even when it appears to be against their fundraising interests, the Democrats felt pressured last week to live up to their anti-corruption pledge that swept them into the office in the last election.

"The most important thing for our new members is to be able to go back to their constituents and say they were part of changing the direction in Washington, and that includes holding Congress accountable and holding members accountable," Rep. Van Hollen, DCCC chairman said.

Jeanne Cummings concludes her column by saying:

The goal is create enough transparency to discourage bad behavior.

To that end, the new disclosure rules do significantly increase the tools that political opponents, government investigators, reform groups and the news media can use to monitor the links between lawmakers and lobbyists.

They also considerably boost the odds that one of them will stumble across the signs of mischief.

 

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While it’s a little odd see Dick Morris, the former hired gun political advisor of both Bill Clinton and Trent Lott, show an interest in congressional ethics, it’s worth noting that among the reforms he proposes (indeed, the top one on his list) is banning campaigns and Political Action Committees from hiring family members of members of Congress. Morris has a pretty long list that includes not just spouses, not just children, but also brothers, cousins, nephews and an in-law:

Those who have hired spouses and family members include: Reps. Richard Pombo (R-Calif.), wife and two brothers; Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), husband’s law firm; Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), wife and step-daughter; John Doolittle (R-Calif.), wife; Ralph Hall (R-Texas), daughter-in-law; Pete Stark (D-Calif.), wife; Buck McKeon (R-Calif.), wife; Ron Lewis (R-Ky.), wife; Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), wife; Jim Costa (D-Calif.), cousin; Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.), wife; Dave Reichert (R-Wash.), nephew; Chris Cannon (R-Utah), three daughters; Lincoln Davis (D-Tenn.), sister-in-law and daughter; Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), wife; Tim Bishop (D-N.Y.), daughter; Bob Filner (D-Calif.), wife; J.D. Hayworth (R-Ariz.), wife; Bob Inglis (R-S.C.), wife; Elton Gallegly (R-Calif.), wife; Sherwood Boehlert (R-N.Y.), wife; John Sweeney (R-N.Y.), wife; Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), wife; Ed Pastor (D-Ariz.), nephew; John Shadegg (R-Ariz.), son; and Howard Berman (D-Calif.), brother Michael’s political consulting firm; Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), son; and Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.), son and daughter during vice presidential race; and ex-Reps. Bob Ney (R-Ohio), wife; and Tom DeLay (R-Texas), wife and daughter.

Worth clipping and saving. Number two on Morris’s list is banning family members from lobbying Congress, also a worthy idea. But I would add that there needs to be some kind of disclosure for adult children — which the stories about Rep. Silvestre Reye’s advocacy for a contractor that hired his children so richly demonstrate:

Reyes has been a key backer of the system and its contractor, International Microwave Corp. Shortly after its 1999 contract award, the firm hired Rebecca Reyes to serve as a liaison to what was then the Immigration and Naturalization Service. She ultimately became IMC’s vice president for contracts. IMC also hired her brother, Silvestre Reyes Jr., as a technician on the program, known as the Integrated Surveillance Intelligence System, or ISIS.

I wouldn’t object to any of the other items on Morris’ list, although I think all of them could go farther.

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We’ve already got two separate items linked on the reported investigations of Rep. Rick Renzi, R-Ariz. One concerns his involvement in a land swap deal that made a $3 million profit for James Sandlin, a a real estate investor who’d bought half of a business owned by Renzi for $200,000 in 2001 (Sandlin would later buy the rest for somewhere between $1,000,001 and $5 million). The second story notes an inquiry into Renzi’s influence on behalf of a government contractor, Mantech International, of which his father is an executive vice president.

The Sandlin inquiry is particularly interesting; Justin Rood has much more on it at TPM Muckraker (with the story advanced further here). What I find interesting is the extent to which the Sandlin-Renzi relationship helped the latter in his first campaign for Congress in 2002. The Federal Election Commission audited Renzi’s 2002 campaign committee, Rick Renzi for Congress, and found that the candidate had loaned more than $760,000 to his own coffers–by far the single greatest source of funds. Among the money that Renzi said that he loaned to his 2002 effort was the $200,000 raised by selling half of Renzi Investments Inc. (later renamed Fountain Realty & Development, Inc.) to Sandlin. In its investigation of the matter, the FEC focused on the narrow, somewhat snooze-inducing issue of who owned the $200,000 (and other money) that Renzi transferred to his campaign: Was this personal money, or were these contributions from Renzi Investments Inc., a Subchapter S Corpoartion (and thus barred, under federal election law, from contributing to a campaign). From the FEC Audit Report:

Although [Rick Renzi for Congress] representatives indicated that the sale of 50% of the Candidate’s interest in Fountain Realty & Development, Inc. was a source of funds for some of the loans, the documentation available at that time did not support that representation. …Bank records for the Candidate, Renzi & Co. Inc. and Fountain Realty & Development, Inc. were provided only for December 2001, and did not establish how and when the proceeds of the sale were received by the Candidate. Other documents detailed the sale of the interest to two individuals; however, no information concerning how the purchase price was determined was provided.

At the exit conference, the Audit staff presented this matter to RRFC representatives. They maintained that the funds in question were generated through the sale of various business asstes. They argued that these busines entities were owned soley or in majority by the Candidate; therefore, profits from the sale of these business assets, were funds of the Candidate.

It would be interesting to see how the purchase price was determined (there may well be documents the FEC didn’t see), especially since, as the audit report suggests, Renzi’s campaign maintained it was raising funds by the sale of business assets. It’s also worth noting what the FEC found as they investigated these transactions:

During this process, [Rick Renzi for Congress] representatives revised their characterization of the source of the Candidate’s funds for many of these transactions. Many of the transactions previously described as “distributions” from the subchapter S corporations or “proceeds” from the sale of business assets are now characterized as loan repayments to the Candidate. This evolving characterization of the source of the funds necessitated the Audit staff’s request for additional documentation.

And people doubt that evolution is an ongoing process…

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So what is it with members of Congress and land deals? Sen. Harry Reid failed to disclose what the Associated Press describes as “a $1.1 million windfall on a Las Vegas land sale” on property he hadn’t owned for three years. “The complex dealings allowed Reid to transfer ownership, legal liability and some tax consequences to Brown’s company without public knowledge, but still collect a seven-figure payoff nearly three years later,” reporters John Solomon and Kathleen Hennessey wrote. Rep. Charles Taylor, meanwhile, “owns at least 14,000 acres of prime land in western North Carolina. He’s also the local congressman. So when he steers federal dollars to his district, sometimes he helps himself, too,” John Wilkes reported in the Wall Street Journal (the story is available online here). Sen. Bob Menendez has his lease deal with nonprofit for which he’s secured federal funds, while House Speaker Dennis Hastert has his own profits from earmarks and land deals. The real estate dealings of Rep. Gary Miller and Rep. Alan Mollohan have also come under scrutiny (as noted in the Journal article).

Members of Congress file personal financial disclosure forms that are supposed to alert the public of any potential conflicts of interest a lawmaker might have. The foregoing examples suggest that the disclosures are inadequate for the purpose; that members can have substantial personal interests in government policy that are not apparent from looking at the disclosure forms, or that members can file incomplete disclosures or altogether leave out information so that that public is left unaware of a member’s business dealings. Disclosure is meant to safeguard Congress from members acting in their own interets, as the House Ethics Manual makes makes clear:

Public disclosure is intended to provide the information necessary to allow Members’ constituencies to judge their official conduct in light of possible financial conflicts with private holdings. Review of a Member’s financial conduct occurs in the context of the political process.

In other words, if Congressman So-and-so’s financial disclosure form shows he’s lining his pockets with taxpayer money, or renting to nonprofits for which he secures earmarks, or in business with recipients of federal contracts he’s helped secure, throw the bum out of office. But if the bums obfuscate, omit or otherwise obstruct disclosure, the political process will be unable on its own to keep Congress clean.

I am by no means a policy guy, but here’s a recommendation: Why not levy a 100 percent federal tax on any profit not properly disclosed by a member of Congress. That would certainly focus their attention.

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Jeffrey Birnbaum has a tremendously thoughtful piece in the Washington Monthly exploring what the ongoing corruption investigations and prosecutions that stem mostly from Jack Abramoff’s exploits. Full disclosure, I’m a pessimist by nature, so take that into account, but as I read Birnbaum’s piece, I can’t help thinking that his notion that we might be seeing an end to legalized bribery—by which he primarily means the system by which we finance campaigns—is overly optimistic and a little premature.

At the core of Birnbaum’s argument is that practices that have long been regarded as de rigeur are now finding their way into indictments:

The pleas stemming from the Abramoff scandal all involve campaign donations. According to Abramoff’s plea agreement, he, ex-DeLay aide Michael Scanlon, and others “engaged in a course of conduct through which one or both of them offered and provided a stream of things of value to public officials in exchange for a series of official acts…. These things of value included, but are not limited to, foreign and domestic travel, golf fees, frequent meals, entertainment, election support for candidates for government office, employment for relatives of officials, and campaign contributions.” The plea deal for Tony Rudy, also a former DeLay aide, lists “election support” among the things of value he gave with Abramoff and others.

The Abramoff and Scanlon pleas get very specific. The contributions that they swapped for favors included $4,000 to the campaign committee of “Representative #1″ and $10,000 in contributions to the National Republican Congressional Committee “at Representative #1’s request.” Representative #1 has been widely identified as Rep. Bob Ney (R-Ohio), who is under investigation as part of the Abramoff scam. Ney denies any wrongdoing. Officials close to the investigations say that possible campaign-donation bribery is also being looked at as part of the ongoing probes of as many as six other lawmakers.

I suspect that the campaign-donation bribery suspicions related to the other six lawmakers include, as it was with Abramoff and Scanlon, amount to one charge among many. I find it hard to believe that a prosecutor is going to go into court waving an FEC record showing $4,000 in contributions from, say, a pharmaceutical firm and arguing that a vote for the prescription drug bill is evidence of bribery. What made the Abramoff prosecutions and pleas possible was not just campaign contributions, it was also the lavish trips and golfing outings and–perhaps most importantly (and unmentioned by Birnbaum), the profusion of emails that created a paper trail for prosecutors to follow. I imagine that Jack Abramoff is not the only lobbyist with a paper trail of too candid emails. (It would be interesting to see whether firms are taking steps to purge their archives, and whether members of Congress and their staffs are similarly worried about electronic paper trails.)

And, contra Birnbaum, I doubt that Washington behaviors are changing as much as he says, when he writes,

The Abramoff incident has thrown official Washington into a whirl of self-examination and relative self-denial. All sorts of accepted rules and behaviors are being reconsidered. Many lawmakers and congressional staffers are voluntarily staying away from the fancy dinners and lunches that lobbyists love to host, at least for the time being. And one of Capitol Hill’s sweetest and most widely available perks–travel to golf resorts underwritten by private pleaders–has become a rarely sampled treat.

On Monday, June 5, my former colleagues at the Center for Public Integrity will be releasing a massive study and database on congressional trips–both for members and staff–underwritten by third parties; that will provide some empirical evidence against which to measure the relative self-denial in Washington. And for my part, I am so inundated with invitations sent by lobbyists and congressional campaign committees to lobbyists and PAC leaders to attend Washington fundraisers–often at the offices of Washington lobbyists (some of which feature their own in house executive chefs)–that I haven’t been able to keep up with them all. I’ll be posting this week’s invitations as one giant PDF later this afternoon. There’s no baseline for comparison, but I’ll ask around to see if the perception is that there are fewer in the summer of 2006 than there have been in the past.

I think Birnbaum’s most interesting observation comes in his conclusion:

…if groups devoted to reining in Washington’s money culture really wanted to make headway, perhaps they would be wise to focus not only on pushing elected officials to change the system but also on ginning up investigations that might put lawmakers and their donors in jail and perhaps would force the courts to clarify their cloudy definitions of bribery. Money will always have a say in politics. But nowadays, its voice is deafening. Maybe the work of diligent prosecutors will soon allow average voters to be heard more often as well.

Whether such “ginned up” investigations result in jail time for politicians or their donors is besides the point. (And, one observation: Given that some of the legislative battles in Washington that have generated the biggest hauls in campaign cash have pitted one well-heeled interest against another–that is, cable, broadcast, local and long distance phone companies in telecom legislation, or banks, brokerage firms and insurance companies in the Glass Steagall rewrite–we might end up seeing deep pocketed corporate titans, who would have far more resources than public interest non-profits, using the same means to send their adversaries to the big house.) What is clearly needed is a more active and engaged citizenry that holds its public officials accountable, more transparency in the legislative process, and more easily accessible information about the whole process. Investigations that expose the activities of lawmakers to constituents, combined with the ballot, should be sufficient to keep Congress honest.

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InstaPundit posted a bit of this commentary ($$$$) by David Winston, which notes,

The antics of Reps. Cynthia McKinney (D-Ga.) and Patrick Kennedy (D-R.I.) coupled with the ethical cloud now hanging over Reps. Alan Mollohan (D-W.Va.) and William Jefferson (D-La.) and even Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) make it difficult, if not impossible, to take seriously the “corruption” diatribes we hear regularly from top Capitol Hill Democrats.

One might well ask, as the Pet Shop Boys might put it, how can they expect to be taken seriously? Certainly, there is nothing–no ideological orientation, no policy proposal, no higher standard of candidate recruitment–that makes individual Democrats (or Republicans, for that that matter) ethically pure. That being said, the public does care about ethical issues (ask former Sen. Robert Torricelli what he thinks), and Congress–Democrats and Republicans alike–should take quite seriously the public’s disgust with the institution.

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Russ Baker, writing for TomPaine.com, makes what I think is the crucial point when it comes to tales of congressional corruption: It’s not just an individual problem, it’s an institutional one:

No matter how big the affair grows, though, it is likely to follow in the path of so many of its predecessors—distracting public attention from a larger and more important reality: Today, “the largest corruption scandal in a century” is not WatergateGate—it is the everyday performance of the U.S. government. The worst sleaze in Washington is mainly legal…

The main mistake Randy Cunningham made was accepting the goodies while he was still in Congress. There is no crime involved in doing the exact same favors for government contractors, and later joining the company’s board or getting hired as a highly-paid lobbyist, or getting payback on a more indirect basis. That’s the deal all over town, and some of the most “well-respected” names in America have such arrangements—and not all of them are Republicans. The whole thing stinks, but what to do about it? That’s the rub.

When a member of Congress can, as noted below, accept lavish trips year after to year to Hawaii from a special interest that has business before his committee without breaking any rule (and such perks are largely maraschino cherries on the much larger sundaes of lucrative post-congressional career opportunities doled out to members), then clearly there’s a problem that goes beyond that member–one that is institutional in nature.

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• The Denver Post reports on the all-out ethics war in Colorado.
• Campaign contributors have become a point of attack in Maryland, according to the Balitmore Sun.
• Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius (D) is being investigated by the state ethics commission for possible illegal solicitation of campaign contributions from lobbyists.

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