I, for one, am delighted to see the halls of Congress filled with born-again reformers scrambling to get out in front of the Congressional ethics scandal. The momentum for change will pick up, no doubt, as more revelations, plea deals and probably indictments pile up in the weeks to come.
I am hopeful that some good things will happen, especially in the area of lobbying reform. The revolving door has gotten out of hand. Though we have always had a revolving door, the volume of Members and aides going to lobbying firms has increased dramatically, leading to a troubling dynamic in relationships between those on and off Capitol Hill.
These days, lawmakers and staffers see their peers every day--peers now making two to 20 times what they do, operating out of posh offices and dropping by to visit the rabbit warrens in the Longworth House Office Building or Russell Senate Office Building. The lure of the move is tempting, making it easy for insiders to consider doing favors, opening access and sharing secrets, knowing that it ultimately could pay off in a cushy post on K Street. Call it the Tony Rudy Syndrome.
I know that most Hill people are honorable and will remain so; I know many, many people who have kept going as professional staffers and struggled to live in this expensive environment and send their kids to private schools and college, because of their passion for public service. The same is true for most Members, who are not in it for the money.
But the current scandal shows that we have moved from a minor problem to a major headache, and it requires adjustments. Frankly, I am not convinced that a doubling of the current one-year cooling-off period for aides-turned-lobbyists is enough: I think we should consider four or five years. Members and top staff will still be valuable for their policy expertise and understanding of how things operate, and they will find jobs in Washington, D.C., if that’s what they desire. But the switch from inside to outside needs to lose some of what creates an insidious atmosphere of temptation to corrupt.
The same problem exists with earmarks. I have joined many academics in the past in defending the concept of pork: It is natural for lawmakers to protect their districts, and it is so tough to get bills through the obstacles of the legislative process that a little grease on the skids is often necessary as the price to move important things along. But over the past decade, the sheer volume of earmarking, in numbers, dollar amounts and breadth of areas covered, has become overwhelming.
We are no longer talking about a few hundred projects such as bridges, dams and roadways. We are talking now about academic earmarking: bypassing the peer review process to channel the money that is the backbone of the nation’s basic research, or ignoring the best places to build weapons systems, or the larger strategic framework of national defense so that projects and companies dear to well-positioned lawmakers can be aided instead. And we are now talking about many tens of billions of dollars.
This is bad policy, meeting no test of national priorities, distorting spending, and in many cases leading to mediocre research or inferior products. It also creates a hothouse environment for corruption. If hundreds of Members of Congress have the power to direct and control hundreds of millions, or billions, of dollars, of course there are going to be contractors, business people and others who will offer inducements to lawmakers to steer things their way.
If you can buy a Member for a million bucks and get in return a $200 million defense contract, that is quite a bargain. Maybe former Rep. Duke Cunningham (R-Calif.) is the lone bad apple in the barrel who succumbed to the devil, but it is likely that there are more Cunninghams out there--albeit not many who got $2.4 million out of the deal. And of course, as in so many areas, the arrow does not go in only one direction. We are probably going to find lawmakers trying to raise money for their leadership political action committees who offered to steer contracts, projects or benefits to donors in return for handsome contributions.
We are not going to eliminate pork, but we can find ways to reduce earmarking back to reasonable levels, and to reduce the chance of chicanery. But in this area--as in the case of relations between Members, staff and lobbyists--the secret is less in the laws and rules themselves, and more in the enforcement.
The most significant enforcement mechanism that needs reform is the ethics process. As many observers and insiders have pointed out, what Jack Abramoff, Michael Scanlon and no doubt many of their friends and associates have done is illegal under current law. But as Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) noted on Sunday, the outrage here is what is legal, not what is illegal. There were many signs of unethical behavior by Members of Congress and staff long before the indictments and plea deals of Abramoff and Co., but no sign that the House or Senate ethics committees grappled with them, investigated anything or tried to head off the scandal at the pass. In the House especially, the ethics process has broken down entirely.
Senate Democrats have proposed an Office of Public Integrity for that body, a parallel to the Justice Department’s section, that would be responsible for lobbying disclosure forms and make sure that the laws and rules surrounding them were policed. That is a good idea, but way too limited.
Some in the House have been kicking around the idea of a Chief Ethics Officer, vested with the power to investigate ethics complaints and then to refer them to the ethics committee. That might also work, but would probably be drawn too narrowly.
It is time for both houses to bite the bullet and make the real change: an independent ethics panel operating within the rubric of each chamber, populated in significant part by those who know the legislative process in Congress intimately, but are not in the conflicted position of having to judge current colleagues. This panel would have the power to initiate investigations, hear complaints and follow through on them, and then make recommendations to the internal ethics committees and to each chamber, respectively, about appropriate punishment. All you erstwhile reformers: Just do it.
Norman Ornstein is a resident scholar at AEI.
