Campaign Finance | City Ethics

February 12, 2014

Winter Reading: Rick Hasen's "Lobbying, Rent-Seeking, and the Constitution"

UC at Irvine Law School professor Richard Hasen's essay, "Lobbying, Rent-Seeking, and the Constitution," 64 Stanford Law Review 191 (2011), is a good complement to the Teachout essay I recently wrote about. Besides its valuable look at the idea that lobbying should be regulated because it is harmfu…

Campaign Finance & Pay-to-Play January 13, 2014

Vote Buying, A Different Sort of Gift

An interesting article in today's New York Times focuses on an unusual feature of an unhealthy local government ethics environment. This feature is payment for votes, something we think of in terms of old city machines. In this case, it involved school board elections in Donna, TX, a town of 16,000…

December 4, 2013

NY's Moreland Commission Recommendations Too Criminally Oriented

New York State's Moreland Commission to Investigate Public Corruption filed a preliminary report on Monday. Most of the report involves state campaign finance and election laws, but many of these laws affect local government practices, as well. Those involving government ethics criminalize it, and …

Campaign Finance & Pay-to-Play December 3, 2013

Nagle on Withdrawal As Cure for Campaign Contributions

It was pointed out to me by Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School Los Angeles, that back in 2000 John Copeland Nagle, a professor at Notre Dame Law School, wrote a law review article suggesting what I call the Westminster Approach to campaign contributions from those seeking benefits from…

Campaign Finance & Pay-to-Play November 25, 2013

When Campaign Finance Oversight Sucks Up an Ethics Program's Resources

An editorial in yesterday's New Orleans Times-Picayune points out a problem that is common to many ethics programs that have jurisdiction over both conflicts of interest and campaign finance: campaign finance sucks up the program's resources, leaving too few resources for other things, including t…

Campaign Finance & Pay-to-Play November 4, 2013

Old and New Local Independent Spending in Elections

Update: February 7, 2014 It took the Jon Stewart Show three months to catch up with the City Ethics blog, but it was worth the wait. You have to watch the video they made about the Coralville, IA situation I discuss below. The defense of what occurred is truly incredible. There has always been inde…

October 23, 2013

DeKalb County (GA) Grand Jury Report on Procurement-Related Misconduct

It all started with the indictment, on charges of bribery and theft, of a Fats, Oil & Grease inspector back in November 2010. It led to an 83-page grand jury report in August 2013, which set out the misconduct involving the DeKalb County (GA) Department of Watershed Management (DWM) procurement pro…

September 25, 2013

Isolated Scheme or Commonplace Corruption?

Yesterday, a felony complaint was issued against William Rapfogel, the CEO of the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty, a large nonprofit social service agency that received millions of dollars in grants and contracts from New York City, New York state, and the federal government. One of the char…

Campaign Finance & Pay-to-Play April 4, 2013

What to Say Instead of "I Can't Be Bought"

We often hear elected officials saying, "I can't be bought at any price." The assumption behind this statement is that there is no amount of money, no job offer, nothing that will make the elected official act or vote any way than the way he otherwise intends to act or vote, that he cannot be influ…

March 1, 2013

Los Angeles Election Database Goes Online

Yesterday, Los Angeles' KCET-TV put up a database on it website to show who's giving to candidates in the current city and school board elections. You can see which city officials, business people, and others are giving, who's getting contributions from which zipcodes, and more. The database is a b…

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