Stephen Colbert has been doing a great job satirizing the current federal campaign finance situation. He has especially made a mockery of the Super PAC, a means of allowing individuals and entities to make unlimited contributions to a candidate's campaign under the guise of independent expenditures. Colbert has shown how weak the rules on collaboration are, how the Super PAC is effectively, if not constitutionally, no different than a campaign committee. (Check out a five-part Huffington Post series on what Colbert has been doing, complete with videos.)

Government ethics could use the same treatment. With government ethics, the joke isn't that contributions to Super PAC allow exactly the same level of possible corruption as campaign contributions (whatever the narrow Supreme Court majority may think). With government ethics, the joke is that at the heart of nearly every local government conflict of interest program is a big conflict of interest.

As I near the end of writing my local government ethics book, I am going over local government ethics codes looking for unusual, but valuable provisions to include in a special section that follows my discussion of the run-of-the-mill provisions.

I would like to share one of these provisions that is truly worth thinking about. It appears in the Windsor, CO ethics code:

§5.2.M. No elected or appointed official or public body member shall offer or promise to give his or her vote or influence in favor of or against any proposed official action in consideration or upon condition that any other elected or appointed official, public body member, will promise or assent to give his or her vote or influence in favor of or against any other proposed official action.

The creation of an ethics task force is a popular way for local government leaders to pursue ethics reform. It provides the appearance of community involvement and independence, and it means that reform ideas are not something to be imposed by a mayor on council members and other officials, which can cause a great deal of resentment.

Atlanta's Mayor Franklin chose this route in 2002, as did Philadelphia's Mayor Nutter in 2008. One difference is that Franklin appointed her own task force, while Nutter allowed community organizations to pick seven of the nine members of his task force.

The latest mayor to take this route is Chicago's Mayor Emanuel. What is unusual about his use of the task force is that he is not responding to a scandal, but rather doing what he promised in his campaign.

“The concern with potential corruption does not stop just because the relationship has entered the bedroom.’’

For those of you who think my blog needs a little spice, this is a good ice breaker. These are the words of Kathay Feng, head of California Common Cause, spoken at a meeting of the Fair Political Practices Commission, California's state ethics commission, which has jurisdiction over local officials and employees (quoted from yesterday's PolitiCal column in the Los Angeles Times). The issue was a proposal to allow officials in a “dating relationship’’ with a lobbyist to accept and not disclose “personal benefits commonly exchanged between people on a date or in a dating relationship.’’

One thing jumped out at me from an article on the front page of the New York Times today that deals with a common government ethics situation. The situation involves a lobbyist hired because he had a close personal and professional relationship with the head of a department that had to approve his client's project.

The ordinary issue here is that, while the lobbyist should certainly not have been allowed to lobby the head of the department, should he have been allowed to lobby officials and employees who would naturally want to make the department head happy?

The issue that jumped out, however, involved a deal that appears to have been made. There is serious environmental opposition to one aspect of the project. Therefore, that aspect was changed to lessen the opposition and make it easier to get the project approved. This is a good and common compromise.

Yet another brief has been filed in the Carrigan v. Commission on Ethics of the State of Nevada case, this time the EC's supplemental brief on remand to the Nevada Supreme Court.

The principal issue discussed in this brief is vagueness, which has stood in the background behind First Amendment issues of free speech and free association. The free speech arguments were put to rest by the U.S. Supreme Court, and the free association arguments were found not to have been originally raised, so they were dismissed.

In a blog post on the oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court, I discussed some of the issues raised in this brief, because they were discussed by the justices, even though their decision itself said nothing about vagueness, because the Nevada courts had not reached this issue. Now it will be discussed, and its discussion raises far more interesting and important issues than how the First Amendment applies to government ethics.