Robert Wechsler's blog

"Every lie is an exception we carve out for ourselves."

--Bill Curry, columnist for the Hartford Courant, former councillor to President Clinton and gubernatorial candidate in Connecticut. From his March 11 column on the Libby trial and lying among politicians.

According to an article in the Tennessean, the Tennessee House passed a bill that would allow lawmakers ten days to correct 'errors' in their campaign finance disclosure forms once the Registry of Election Finance warned them of problems.

For example, if they intentionally left out donations and got caught, they could add them in and nothing would happen. The argument is that...

In an earlier blog entry, I took the side of the Louisiana Board of Ethics in its dispute with the state legislature over whether it has jurisdiction over legislators who participate in debate when they have a conflict of interest. In another case, which the Board of Ethics lost on appeal, I feel the Board of Ethics was wrong, and I feel it is instructive to say why.

The matter involved two parish council members who voted for...

It is not enough to reform a city's ethics program. One must also let the world know about it. Most municipalities reform their ethics in a vacuum. They might look at a nearby town or city, or two, but the people in charge rarely know what is happening elsewhere, what are the norms and what are the latest reforms. This is one of the reasons we have put this website together.

Until recently, Chinese orphanages, run by municipalities, gave their orphans two kinds of surnames, either a...

With apologies to Louisiana, since this week I've already focused on its legislators' dispute with its Board of Ethics, I'm going to return to the state to discuss a situation where local government ethics can make a great difference.

On the front page of today's New York Times, an article looks at reasons why so little money has made it from Washington to local government infrastructure...

Who should and who should not sit on elections commissions? Other than land-use commissions (and, sadly, ethics commissions), elections commissions are probably the most abused in terms of membership.

Take the election commission in Hamblen County, according to the March 7-10, 2007 entries in the noe4accountability blog. It has five members. One has a son running for the county commission, one is the father of a mayor in the county (who is...