Post-Employment/Revolving Door

Lax post-employment provisions can come back to haunt high-level officials. They may have been thinking of their futures and those of their close colleagues when they opposed laws that would require them not to represent anyone before the government for a year or two after leaving public service. But when one of their close colleagues takes advantage of the resulting hole in the post-employment provision and becomes a lobbyist, it reflects poorly on the high-level official in two ways.

According to an article in yesterday's New York Times, U.S. Senate majority leader Harry Reid's spokesman said with respect to questions regarding his hiring of a tax adviser away from General Electric, "The impulse in some quarters to reflexively cast suspicion on private sector experience is part of what makes qualified individuals reluctant to enter public service."

At the Institutional Corruption Conference sponsored by Harvard's Safra Center last Saturday, Bruce Cain, a professor at UC Berkeley, pointed out that the permeable boundary between government and business (and, I would add, business law) brings into government many individuals who have a different concept of ethics. That is, in the business world, loyalty to one's supervisors (or clients) and to the company is the most important thing. In government, loyalty should be to the public. Of course, this is not loyalty as we know it, so loyalty should be suppressed as much as possible.

The COGEL conference last week had an excellent panel on the revolving door between government and business. One thing I learned is that the first post-employment laws were passed in the 1850s and 1860s, and they involved lawyers, a group that often argues that ethics laws should not apply to them (in fact, in Pennsylvania, someone said, revolving door laws cannot be applied to practicing attorneys). The idea of a cooling-off period after government service originated in 1955, well before the post-Watergate explosion of government ethics laws.

This week the Council on Governmental Ethics Laws (COGEL) met in Washington, D.C. and, as usual, I learned about a lot of cases and matters I didn't know about. I will be sharing some of the more important of my new revelations in blog posts over the next couple of weeks.

(In a debate about a revolving door provision, also known as a "cooling off period")

"You do not take pizza from the oven and put it straight in your mouth. I believe that we should not take our legislative service and put it right in our own mouth."

—Missouri State Senator Jason Crowell (from an article in the Columbia Missourian). Unlike most of my Quotes of the Day, I found this one delightful.