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November 18, 2006

Congress Polices Itself

The Democrats are looking to address the voters' concerns about corruption with some ethics reforms as soon as they control the Congress in January. Unsurprisingly, incumbents are a lot less excited about tighter ethics laws than the new Representatives and Senators, who haven't had the chance to take advantage of currently existing loopholes yet. So what are the chances of meaningful reform? Probably pretty slim.

I'm sure Speaker Pelosi would like to follow through on her promise to create "the most honest, most open and most ethical Congress in history." But she's got to fight 434 other members, most of whom aren't interested in creating laws that could send them to jail. After all, half the fun of being in Congress is creating laws that trample the little people's freedoms while leaving Congress free and clear to do as they will. Why tighten the screws on yourself? It just doesn't make sense from the perspective of a member of Congress, and so ethics reform will include some cosmetic changes, but nothing more.

Observe, for example, Senator Dianne Feinstein's reaction to the idea of an independent office to watch for Congressional malfeasance: "If the law is clear and precise, members will follow it...As to whether we need to create a new federal
bureaucracy to enforce the rules, I would hope not." Yes, because that was the problem with Congressmen Randy Cunningham, Bob Ney, and William Jefferson: they just didn't understand the laws. Now the flip side of that is that those three did end up being caught, but how many others slipped the net, like Speaker Pelosi's choice for Majority Leader, Jack Murtha? Not that I'm suggesting Murtha broke the law, mind you. But he sure looked like he wouldn't mind doing so if he could get away with it in that video.

Other Democrats just argue that ethics scandals are a Republican problem. Certainly they were predominantly Republican in recent years, but I suspect that is more a matter of the Republicans being in power than some innate goodness of Democrats or innate evil of Republicans. No, I'm of the opinion that there will be Democrats willing to take bribes and kickbacks if they can get away with it, just as there are Republicans who did so. Human frailty is a bipartisan problem, and the solution to it is rules with teeth.

None of this is to say, I should note, that the Democrats will be particular failures when they don't pass strict ethics laws. The Republicans have certainly had plenty of opportunities over the years, and they never bothered to fix the problems. Expecting better of the Democrats is a nice hope, but hoping for that would be to ignore human nature. By February there will be some cosmetic ethics rules on the books, the Democrats will crow about how this demonstrates they're ethically superior to Republicans, and we'll go back to business as usual until the FBI nabs another of our crooked leaders.

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