An ethics bill in the District of Columbia, sponsored by council member Muriel Bowser, went quickly through committee and was passed by the council, with only one dissenting vote, on December 20 (the final committee bill can be found here). What's amazing about it is that, despite the speed with which it moved, Bowser's staff made many improvements to the bill in response to critiques from me and others. It is not a perfect bill, of course, but it's a pretty special gift for the holiday season.

Imagine this story. A mayor calls a group of local contractors and developers to a closed meeting on furthering economic growth in the city. The guests are given a welcome pack, and in the welcome pack is a plain brown, unmarked envelope. The mayor ran on a platform of stopping corruption, but the contractors and developers have seen this happen before. Politicians are all the same, they think.

During the meeting, the mayor asks her guests to open the envelopes. Inside the envelopes is one sheet of paper, on which the guests are asked to write the names of three local government officials or employees who have asked them for, or simply expected and accepted, gifts, bribes, kickbacks, or the hiring of relatives. She promises to have these individuals investigated.

The situation of Rose Pak, a power broker for San Francisco's Chinese-American community who was featured a week ago in a New York Times article, raises some interesting questions. A paid consultant to the Chinese Chamber of Commerce, she has never held public office. Nor has she ever registered as a lobbyist or been an official member of a campaign, even that of the Chinese-American man who was just elected mayor, Edwin Lee. According to the article, she has mobilized Chinese votes, volunteers, and contributions for a succession of mayors and city supervisors in return for city financing of social programs and building projects in Chinatown. She also helps Chinese-Americans get appointments in the city government, most notably Lee's appointment as interim mayor (he had been the city administrator).

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.

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.

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.