Ethics Reforms Will Fail Without Enforcement

The Republican Party on Capitol Hill has suddenly realized that being seen as corrupt is bad for re-election prospects. In a fit of righteous indignation against itself, and largely due to the indictment of Jack “Gotta Sing” Abramoff, the leadership of congress has stepped forward with tougher ethics rules for members of congress. Unfortunately, new rules without real enforcement will be meaningless, and no one in congress has much of an interest in that.

The Senate is a bit better off than the House on this one, because the Senate rules allow outsiders to bring ethics charges whereas the House rules do not. Moreover, since the members of the Senate face re-election every sixth year rather than every other year, their need to please contributors is somewhat diminished. Finally, scrutiny of Senate candidates in larger states is greater than the House candidates simply because there are so many more in the lower chamber. That said, Senate Majority Leader Frist still has to explain his stock trading habits.

Both parties came out with a raft of proposals that sure look like making it harder for corrupt people to buy legislative favors. The Republicans have proposed lower the value of gifts a lobbyist could give to $20 from $50 while the hair-shirt Democrats want to ban them entirely. Conference committees, which reconcile House and Senate versions of legislation and where many sweetheart deals first wind up in legislation, would have to be held in the open. No-bid contracts might be abolished (why they exist is a case that still needs to be made).

All of this is fine, but to believe that a congressman or senator would sell his vote for a $49.99 pen and pencil set but not for the $19.99 version is stupid. Cousins get jobs, loans get approved that wouldn’t otherwise, and consulting work handed out two years after congressional retirement – these are the real problems. Only an ethics committee prepared to punish regardless of party and standing can work, but that doesn’t benefit anyone with a seat in the legislature.

Worse, the real problem isn’t congress but rather the voters. So long as one of the measures of effectiveness is how much money and how many jobs came to a state or district because of a given representative the corruption will persist. As Scottish Professor Alexander Tyler wrote more than 200 years ago in his work The Decline and Fall of the Athenian Republic:

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasure. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most money from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's great civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through the following sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith, from spiritual faith to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependency, from dependency back to bondage.