Campaign Finance

The term "situational ethics" derives from a particular theory of a priest named Joseph Fletcher, but it is more generally understood to mean dealing with ethics in terms of a particular situation and particular goals (ends-oriented ethics). In other words, it is ethics that allows for different rules in different circumstances, but also for self-serving, sometimes hypocritical, ethical statements and actions.

The Supreme Court has been nibbling away at campaign finance laws for years now, but the one thing all but one of the justices agree on is that requiring the disclosure of contributions does not infringe on first amendment speech rights.

Then why, as stated in the Washington Post yesterday, have organizations sponsoring issue ads failed to list the sources of their funding 85% of the time this year, when in 2004 they only failed to do this 29% of the time?

Targeting Ethics Reform
In May, I wrote a blog post about ethics reforms proposed by a Cook County (IL) commissioner. I felt they didn't have much chance of passing.

Update: September 26, 2010 (see below)

Disclosure forms are important. Sometimes, even secondary information can be important. But it can take a lot of work to get behind the information that appears on disclosure forms. And when you do get behind the information, it can look real ugly, even if it's completely legal.

The law on limiting campaign expenditures has been changing over the past couple of years. But the law on limiting campaign contributions has not. The standard in many instances is more liberal than with campaign expenditures, in others it is the same. And the application of the standard is highly contextual. A law in one jurisdiction, or at a particular time, might be constitutional, while in another jurisdiction, or at a different time, it is not.

There's a good opinion piece by Austin American-Statesman columnist Jason Embry this week on the political use of ethics complaints. The instances of abuse of the ethics process is what has led many jurisdictions to prohibit any mention of filing an ethics complaint and to prohibit the filing of ethics complaints within sixty or so days of an election.

A Poor Approach to Being Ethical
It's great when candidates talk up acting ethically. But it's going too far, and setting a bad precedent, when a candidate takes a lie-detector test in which he says that he never engaged in unethical activities in private- or public-sector work, as reported in the Moultrie (GA) Observer.

You be the judge. According to an article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, a board member of a Georgia-based insurance company set up ten PACs in Alabama that together gave $120,000 — ten times the legal limit — to a candidate for Georgia insurance commissioner.

Image by Joe Wu

Following up on the previous blog post, here is the first of two examples of local government ethics matters involving anonymity outside of an internet context.

When is a gift a campaign contribution? This issue has been raised in the trial of a Manhattan surrogate court judge, according to an article in yesterday's New York Times.