Proximity rules are common to local and state government ethics codes nationwide (see my blog post on them from five years ago). They require officials to withdraw from any matter dealing with property within a certain distance of property they own or rent, no matter how many others have property within the same proximity.

According to a big exposé piece in yesterday's Washington Post, "Congressional representatives are required to certify that they do not have a financial stake in the actions they take." But the rules they have written to apply to themselves do not address proximity. The issue is not proximity, but the process by which proximity was not addressed.

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.

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.

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.

I came across a decision in Patty Salkin's Law of the Land blog today involving a federal statute that allows federal prosecution of those who give gifts to local officials in amounts greater than $5,000. Proof of bribery is not necessary, but evidence needs to be shown that the gift was given "with intent to influence or reward." This is somewhere between a gift provision in an ethics code and a bribery provision in a criminal code. The local government must have received federal funding, but this is true of most local governments, especially the larger ones. 18 U.S.C §666(a)(2) reads as follows:

Sometimes, conflicts are built right into ethics laws, partly because it is in the political interest of those with conflicts, and partly because they don't even view those laws as ethics laws.

A good example of this is the Connecticut law (CGS §9-623) that places enforcement of municipal campaign finance laws in the hands of city and town clerks. In Connecticut, clerks are often elected officials who usually run on a ticket with mayoral or first selectman candidates, and on a party ticket with other elected officials. In smaller towns, they are appointed by the board of selectmen.