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.