Robert Wechsler's blog

Adolf Eichmann is the iconic extreme of the government bureaucrat. Not that any of us will hopefully ever be given orders like the ones he was given, but his simply following orders makes anyone question his or her own simply following orders.

There’s a lot more about government ethics that can be learned from Adolf Eichmann, I found from reading Hannah Arendt’s book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). When one sees acts that are often done without...

I just watched the film Hands Over the City, and I believe it should hop up to the top of City Ethics’ list of Top Ten Ethics Films.

Hands Over the City is a dramatic film that is about municipal government ethics, and nothing else. A film whose central fact is a glaring conflict of interest.

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When we talk about gifts to politicians, we often talk about gifts of nominal value being okay. Buy a politician a coffee, what’s wrong with that?

But what happens when it’s the other way around? What if the politician buys a coffee for a citizen? One citizen, no problem. A few more at a fundraiser, that’s okay (and it's not buying votes, but rather buying more money). But what about thousands of citizens? When does something of nominal value become something with a corrupt intention...

Last year, soon after I contracted to act as Administrator to the New Haven Democracy Fund, a new public campaign financing program, the Executive Director of Connecticut Common Cause called me (I sat on the board of CT Common Cause). He said that he had been asked to write a report about the Fund for the national office. My response was that I had to write a report to the State Elections Enforcement Commission, so why should he bother to write another? My report could serve both needs. He...

Congressmen and -women sometimes act as if they didn't know the first thing about government ethics. Even when their actions are more in the public eye than usual, many of them unnecessarily, and selfishly, do the wrong thing.

This week, Congress seems to be all about Roger Clemens, who is definitely of more interest than health care, the economy, or Iraq. And what did 25 of the 40 members of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform do before providing oversight over...

Detroit’s mayor Kwame M. Kilpatrick is the new poster boy for misuse of office, lack of transparency, and covering up unethical behavior.

According to an article in the Detroit Free Press, it all began with an extramarital affair with his chief of staff, which he denied time and again (including on the witness stand), but finally admits to after...