Complaints/ Investigations/Hearings

Election time makes public many ethics situations that make valuable case studies. One involves Florida gubernatorial candidate Rick Scott.

I recently wrote about a situation in Stamford, CT in which probable cause was found based on a policy declaration rather than an enforceable ethics provision. That situation appeared to involve a misunderstanding, with a unanimous ethics commission finding probable cause.

Many jurisdictions have a rule that disallows the filing of an ethics complaint against an elected official within so many days before an election. The purpose of such a rule is to prevent the abuse of the ethics process for political purposes. But is this the best solution to this problem?

Forget the fascinating range of ethics programs at the local level. It is congressional ethics programs that get the national attention. And with all this attention, what Congress does, and fails to do, has a great effect not only on what happens at the local level, but also on the rhetoric employed there.

When Congress self-administered its own ethics, every council or county commission member could say that if self-regulation is good enough for Congress, it's good enough for them. Only legislative bodies, the rhetoric went, can oversee legislators.

Using government employees for private purposes is one of the most common ethics code violations.

This violation is especially bad because it involves coercion of individuals, in this case subordinates who are not in a position to say no. Coercion and intimidation rarely occur outside of a poor ethical environment.

This violation also shows a serious failure to recognize the boundary between public and private, which is the heart of government ethics.

Last Saturday's Atlanta Journal-Constitution ran a long article, "Connections Count at Law Firm," on the Washington/Atlanta-based law firm McKenna Long & Aldridge. This firm was known to me primarily as the firm behind the Pay to Pay Law Blog, a good, although too infrequent blog that looks at government ethics and campaign finance from the compliance side, that is, fr

In a recent blog post, I wrote about a federal third circuit decision that a law prohibiting an ethics complainant from announcing the filing of the complaint violates the complainant's first amendment rights. This decision contradicts a second circuit decision that upheld a law prohibiting the announcing of the filing of a judicial ethics complaint.

According to an article in the News-Tribune, the governor of Missouri recently signed an ethics bill (SB 844) that made many changes in the state's ethics and campaign finance programs, and failed to make others, such as a campaign contribution limit, which the legislature had eliminated in 2006.

Update: October 22, 2010 (see below)

Recently, I wrote a blog post on the political use of ethics complaints and the manipulation of the press. Yesterday, the third circuit court of appeals effectively, and I think wrongly, disagreed with one of my principal arguments in that post, and therefore came to the wrong decision.

While I was away on vacation, the new, quasi-independent Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) was in the news a lot.

Going Outside of Congress