Conflicts

Yesterday, the Ninth Circuit, in its decision in U.S. v Renzi, considered what constitutes a "legislative act" with respect to the constitutional Speech or Debate Clause, which provides legislative immunity to legislators by preventing the executive and judicial branches from investigating or hearing matters involving legislative acts.

According to the Wisconsin Supreme Court majority, a state legislature does not have to follow ethics laws, even ethics laws expressly designed to meet constitutional requirements. This shocking statement comes from the opinion in the case Wisconsin v. Fitzgerald, which I discussed in a recent blog post.

The dream of every ethics commission is to have a guaranteed budget. But it is not really a dream for two reasons. One, there are ethics commissions with guaranteed budgets. And two, it is a reasonable policy that can be countered only by a local legislative body's need for control. This blog post will look at the arguments for and against a guaranteed budget, as well as several examples of and approaches to guaranteeing budgets for ethics commissions and similar independent bodies and agencies.

The Arguments For and Against

At the very end of last year, a grand jury filed a report that found a great deal of corruption in Florida's state and local governments, and made numerous recommendations for ethics reform (see my blog post on the report). This provided the perfect opportunity for improving ethics programs across the state.

Government ethics is dangerous to dating and weddings. That's the message of an article in Sunday's Palm Beach Post.

In a letter to the editor in yesterday's New York Times, two lawyers who represent clients seeking to gut Arizona's Citizens Clean Elections public campaign financing program end by calling Arizona's program "a vision of unconstitutional dystopia, not free speech."

It's always nice to know that your discipline is at the heart of what it means to be human. In Tuesday's New York Times Science Section, Nicholas Wade wrote:

Biologists have little hesitation in linking humans’ success to their sociality. The ability to cooperate, to make individuals subordinate their strong sense of self-interest to the needs of the group, lies at the root of human achievement.

What politicians say about a government ethics issue is sometimes so devoid of a basic understanding of government ethics that it's hard to believe that they are not being willfully ignorant (i.e., not discussing ethics matters with ethics professionals) or cynically disingenuous. If only there could be some requirement that, before an official opens his or her mouth to say something about government ethics, he or she actually discussed the matter with someone who does understand it. Not any lawyer, but a professional in the field.

The U.S. is not the only country with a revolving-door problem. In Japan, the problem is deeply institutionalized. It is as much a part of the retirement system as pensions.

Note: I made a few important changes to this blog post on January 10, in conjunction with the posting of my analysis of the parties' briefs in this case.