Ethics Reform Usually Means Ethics Changes
While most people in Massachusetts are cheering on the ethics reform package that was just passed, at least one state representative has focused on the compromises and limitations of the package, calling it a first step. Most responses to scandals are partial rather than changing the entire environment, and in her excellent guest column Rep. Jennifer Callahan points out the problems with this.

I don’t care what state you are talking about, you are always going to have one or two people who are going to do the wrong thing. That’s human life. But the bottom line is: I can tell you that my members who are in the House of Representatives are here for the right reason, and I am just a little cautious to make a regulation for one person.

Reaction of Rhode Island House Speaker William J. Murphy to Gov. Carcieri's suggestion that the state legislature place a constitutional amendment on the 2010 ballot, giving the public a chance to give the state ethics commission full jurisdiction over state legislators, despite the Speech in Debate Clause (see yesterday's blog post). Rhode Island has a long history of so many bad apples, they changed the metaphor to a local fruit:  the cranberry bog. The House Speaker doesn't appear to have kept up. From today's Providence Journal

Money rarely speaks as loudly and personally as it did for Tom Golisano, a billionaire who appears to have been the principal force in pushing the Democrats out of power in Albany, after he was snubbed by the party to which he has been a principal patron. And rarely has a good government advocate shown so clearly that he doesn't even know what government ethics is.

It should come as little surprise to people involved in local government that a New York Times article about bullying among ten- and eleven-year-olds has a great deal of relevance. I said for years about my town's government that its major participants were like ten-year-old boys on a playground, taunting, playing games of intimidation, spreading false rumors, keeping communal secrets, excluding whoever doesn't go along, and staying loyal to those in control so that they aren't excluded themselves.

What's valuable about this article is the solution that the American Academy of Pediatrics is recommending to deal with bullying at school. Its approach "focuses attention on the largest group of children, the bystanders. ... [Its approach] manages to turn the school situation around so the other kids realize that the bully is someone who has a problem managing his or her behavior, and the victim is someone they can protect."

Update (9/30/09)
I tend to focus a lot on weaknesses of ethics codes, but sometimes ethics codes go too far. One reason for this is that they are usually responses to scandals that are criminal in nature, that is, scandals that do not involve conflicts of interest. Another reason is that most people don't understand that ethics codes are really conflict of interest codes, not codes that deal with all of an official's behavior. It's appropriate to have aspirational provisions that go beyond conflicts of interest, as the City Ethics Model Code has, but there are many things, such as truthfulness and civility, that should not become the subject of legal proceedings.

A big issue when ethics codes are being written or revised is whether to limit their provisions to conduct directly relating to government work, or to extend it into the official and employee's non-work life, at least the non-work life that does not involve conflicts with government obligations.

A three-year FBI investigation of Cuyahoga County (which includes Cleveland) appears to have begun with a sting operation involving building inspectors, where an undercover agent offered bribes, and they were accepted, according to an article in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Six building inspectors were charged in May.

But as with most such investigations, the easy acceptance of bribes, or other sorts of unethical behavior, by lower-level employees or officials usually indicates an ethics environment that at least tolerates, if not encourages, such behavior. The investigation usually spreads. The arrest of the building inspectors is only, as one article calls it, the "first phase."