I recently read Judith N. Shklar's book The Faces of Injustice (Yale U.P., 1990). This excellent essay about the difference between misfortune and injustice would not appear to have much to do with government ethics. But there turns out to be much relevant food for thought.

The principal difference between misfortune and injustice lies in how people perceive and interpret events. Those who cause suffering have serious blind spots that make them interpret the event as unavoidable and unfortunate, when in fact they are responsible either for the event or for doing nothing to prevent or fix the situation that led to the event.

This difference is at the heart of the way high-level local officials deal with government ethics. They do not see their misuse of office as causing suffering. They say, to themselves and others, that what they do is in the public's best interest, implying that the public is wrong to see their misconduct as wrong and damaging.

Imagine that you're a county supervisor with a $92,000 salary and, despite the salary, you're allowed to hold an outside job (because the county supervisors before you gave you, and themselves, this opportunity). With a sizeable salary, there would appear to be no reason to work in any field that would create an appearance of impropriety.

A few issues arise in the case of a Pennsylvania state senator who reached a settlement this week with the state's ethics commission that included a fine of $21,000, according to an article in yesterday's Montgomery County Times Herald.

Pennsylvania state senators are paid for the rental of their district offices. This senator's wife (and then the senator himself after their divorce) owned 50% of the company that owned the building where he had his district office, until the company was sold in 2008.

At first blush, it might not seem a problem for an official to rent an office from himself, as long as he is paying the going rate. But what is the going rate? And might the space not have been rented at all if the official didn't rent it to himself? Since these questions are hard to answer, it is best that an official not rent to himself.

For the second time in a year, a local ethics commission has been the subject of a grand jury report. The first was San Francisco's (see my blog post). There, it was a civil grand jury and the focus was on the commission. Here and now, it is a criminal grand jury, and the focus is on the county executive and other officials, as well as ethics commission members. The county is Suffolk, on Long Island, a suburban county of 1.5 million people.

The Need for an Independently Selected Ethics Commission
The Suffolk grand jury report shows an extreme example of what happens when ethics commission members are selected by high-level officials in a poor ethics environment. This worst case was one of ongoing secret, political interference in ethics commission matters and ongoing political warfare that placed the ethics commission right in the middle between the two front lines.

There has been a controversy (which I missed when it originally arose a few months ago) regarding what Mitt Romney and his aides did with their government computer hard drives when Romney left office as governor of Massachusetts. According to an article in the Boston Globe, Romney and his aides purchased 17 hard drives, for $65 each, and "wiped the server for the governor’s office and replaced the remaining computers in the office." The result was that all of the governor's office's electronic communications disappeared.

Romney did what nearly every elected official does when an ethics issue arises:  he said, “They all followed the law exactly as it’s written.” Let's assume that's true. Let's assume that government officials in Massachusetts passed a law or regulation that allows a governor and his aides to take all their electronic communications with them when they leave office.

Former Maricopa County, AZ county attorney Andrew Thomas (with one of his assistants) was disbarred on Tuesday on numerous counts related to bringing false charges against other county officials over a period of years, according to an article in yesterday's Arizona Republic. According to Prof. Bennett Gershman of Pace University, "This is a huge victory for good-government people and people who believe that prosecutors should be accountable for misconduct."

But it is a bigger victory for those who believe government attorneys should be held accountable for their misconduct, whether or not they are prosecutors. Government attorneys are rarely held to account for providing poor ethics advice, or poor advice on any topic. They are rarely held to account for wearing multiple hats and failing to withdraw when their roles are in conflict.