Here's the situation. There is a state ethics program that applies to local governments, and an ethics issue relating to a local law arises. There is no local ethics commission to enforce the local law, so what happens?

This is the situation in Cincinnati. The issue involves a charter provision that prohibits city funds from being disbursed for the purpose of a political campaign. This is usually an ethics matter (misuse of city property), but since there is no ethics commission in Cincinnati, three things happened when a council member put references on her website to her campaign (thereby making use of the city's broadband service), according to an article on Friday in the Cincinnati Enquirer.

A good followup to my last blog post, on Lawrence Lessig's book, is what Jack Abramoff said on 60 Minutes this Sunday, pushing his new book Capitol Punishment.

America's most infamous lobbyist went almost overboard condemning both himself and the system by which lobbyists get what they want out of Congress. He said that he would make job offers to congressional aides, and once he did so, "We owned them. Every request we make, they're going to do it." Former Rep. Bob Ney's chief of staff said on the show that he had a "corrupt relationship" with Abramoff, who offered him a job at a hockey game. Ney, who also did time (the only member related to this scandal to do so) said that he and Abramoff were "involved in a culture of corruption together."

Lawrence Lessig's excellent new book Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress—and a Plan to Stop It (Twelve, Oct. 5, 2011) is about Congress and mostly about campaign finance, but it is also an important look at institutional corruption that has some valuable things to say that are relevant to local government ethics.

Lessig, who is director of the Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics at Harvard University, came to government ethics in an interesting fashion. As a law professor specializing in copyright law, he sought to make out-of-print but copyrighted books available to the public. But his efforts, as reasonable, as clearly in the public interest, and as consistent with the Constitution (which actually mentions copyright) as can be, went nowhere. Instead, copyrights were extended more and more.

Institutional Corruption
Lessig came to realize that what caused these extensions, institutional corruption, is "the gateway problem: until we solve it, we won't solve any number of other critical problems." True reform, in any area, is impossible as long as the current institutional situation remains. Therefore, he switched his focus from copyright to government ethics, with an emphasis on campaign finance.

Once again, an elected official in the national eye took an opportunity to teach the public about government ethics and used it solely to distort government ethics and defend himself.

The official is Texas Governor Rick Perry who, according to an article in yesterday's New York Daily News, was accused of having taken money from the pharmaceutical company Merck and then made an executive order requiring all junior high girls in the state to take a Merck HPV vaccine.

Trust in government is a requirement for participation in government, what the authors of Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life refer to as "civic membership." This is strongest at the local level, where we are most likely to get involved in person rather than through phone calls, petitions, contributions, and voting.

Civic Membership
Our attitudes concerning civic membership affect the essential form of our government, behind the institutions we actually see, which can be no more than the bark of a decayed tree trunk. The authors note that a republican government is dependent on an establishment, as opposed to an oligarchy. “[An] establishment seeks its own good by working for the good of the whole society (noblesse oblige), whereas an oligarchy looks out for its own interests by exploiting the rest of society. … An establishment has a strong sense of civic membership while an oligarchy lacks one. One of the principal differences has to do with taxation:  an oligarchy taxes itself least; an establishment taxes itself most.”

How you present an ethics provision can make all the difference. Take a pay-to-play ordinance proposed in Fort Wayne, which would limit the amount of contributions and gifts that can be given to city officials by an individual or entity if it wants to have a no-bid contract with the city.