The Constitutional Council will assume the role of defining and enforcing ethical behavior throughout the legislature.
Remarks
The idea that legislatures should be in charge of regulating their own behavior may perhaps be worthy of Louisa May Alcott’s world of fiction, but it is not a good idea in the Twenty-first Century. In this regard the first duty for the Constitutional Council is to take over the roles of the ethics committees of both the Senate and the House of Representatives. The first reason for the change is to remove the obvious and unavoidable appearance of bias and often the actual bias of the party in power in the Senate and in the House of Representatives with regards to discovering and adjudicating instances of ethical misconduct.
Starting in July of 2008 and for some months following, after Charlie Rangel had been serving as a Democrat Congressman since January 5, 1971, (over 37 years!), ever-vigilant watchdogs of the Republic like the Washington Post, the New York Times, the New York Post and others suddenly started to notice what might be considered aberrations of Mr. Rangel’s integrity such as: using Congressional letterhead for fundraising purposes; having four(!) rent-stabilized apartments while he also had taken a "homestead" tax break on his Washington, DC, house for years (indicative of multiple illegalities); abuse of a House parking garage as free storage space for his ‘misplaced’ Mercedes-Benz for years; unreported $75,000 of rental income from his three-bedroom, three-bath beachside villa he owns in Punta Cana in the Dominican Republic; denied quid pro quo for his allowing a special tax loophole to persist (reversing his earlier opposition to it) after one of the primary – and few -- beneficiaries of the special loophole donated $1.1M to the Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service of City College of New York; accepting trips of significant duration to Caribbean islands, sponsored by Carib News Foundation, a New York non-profit funded by corporations with interests before Congress and the Ways and Means Committee, of which Rangel was the chairman; and multiple instances of unreported assets and income. (Much of the following elaboration of Congressman Rangel’s ethics issues is adapted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Rangel .)
Concerning the rent-stabilized apartments, three of which he converted into one very large personal apartment, and one used as a campaign office: Rent controlled apartments are only to be used as personal residences, and nobody is legally allowed to have more than ONE rent controlled apartments “Congressional ethics experts said the difference in rent between what Rangel was paying and market rates, an estimated $30,000 per year, could be construed as a gift, exceeding the $100 House of Representatives gift limit. In late July 2008, the House, under the gavel of Democrat Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, voted 254–138 to table a resolution by Republican Minority Leader John Boehner that would have censured Rangel for having ‘dishonored himself and brought discredit to the House’, by occupying the four apartments.”
Concerning Congressman Rangel’s using a House parking garage as free storage space for his Mercedes-Benz for 5 years: Under Internal Revenue Service regulations, free parking (here, worth $290 a month) is considered imputed income, and must be declared on tax returns. Two years later in July 2010 the Democrat-chaired House Ethics Committee ruled that Rangel had committed no violation. (A hilarious account of the details of this imbroglio and the pretzel-like rationale for Rangel’s exoneration is provided by Ben Pershing of The Washington Post, (July 29, 2010), "Charlie Rangel and the case of the idle Mercedes". It highlights among other things that Rangel had essentially forgotten about his spare Mercedes and where he had last parked it.)
Concerning the beachside villa which rented out for as much as $1,100 per night in the busiest tourist season: Labor lawyer Theodore Kheel, a principal investor in the resort development company and frequent campaign contributor to Rangel, had encouraged him to purchase the villa. Rangel purchased it in 1988 for $82,750. He financed $53,737.50 of the purchase price for seven years at an interest rate of 10.5%, but was one of several early investors whose interest payments were waived in 1990. The ethics committee found Mr. Rangel violated the code by failing to report rental income on his Dominican villa.
Throughout this barrage of ethics issues and calls for more than twenty months for Rangel to step down, Democrat Charlie Rangel, until March 3, 2010, keep his position as chairman of The Ways and Means Committee which writes and is responsible for the very U.S. tax code that he was violating in countless ways, all the while with “drain the swamp” Democrat Nancy Pelosi presiding as Speaker of the House. In other words, it took disregard of ethics and integrity to this flagrant extent to rouse the phlegmatic Democratic leadership, such as it was, to finally take at least some action to address its own incandescent corruption. However, to telegraph Pelosi complete cynicism concerning ethical behavior, Queen of the Swamp Pelosi awaited until November 15, 2010 – 28 months since evidence of Rangel’s severe ethical issues surfaced, and 13 days after the 2010 election, which cost the Democrats 63 seats and cost Pelosi her speakership – to allow the Ethics Committee, still controlled by the Democrats for the next month or so, to formally commence its trial of Rangel and his transgressions. This was her way of showing her thoroughly partisan approach with regards to issues of ethics, and of minimizing embarrassment for Rangel, and helping the crook keep his seat through two elections.
This sordid account shows what it takes in order for criminal behavior to be called out, and even mildly punished, in the House of Representatives. Does anyone want to argue that The Senate is materially better? It is hard to know the full extent of all the criminality that passes as ho-hum venality lying below the barely visible surface of the cesspool that is our Federal Government. But it is a sure bet that it will only get worse until there is a much more effective way of cleaning up the behavior of the legislative body. Impunitas semper ad deteriora invitat (Impunity always invites worse things).
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In brief, under the present self-dealing self-management of the political party in power in either the House or the Senate, the “Ethics” Committees serve much less to promote appropriate ethical behavior of legislators than to safeguard scoundrels from scrutiny and to enable truly terrible conduct in all but the most outrageous instances.
As mentioned above the first reason for the Constitutional Council taking over the roles of the ethics committees is to remove the obvious and unavoidable appearance of bias and often the actual bias of the party in power, as illustrated by the inattentive performance of a political party in power to police the corruption its own members. But let us pause for a moment to ponder the shabby regard for ethics, as exampled above. Was it an example of an apple that went bad by itself? Or was it like a piece of fruit found in an environment that essentially engenders things going to rot? It should be evident from the behavior of Nancy Pelosi and the part that she played that the environment is a serious contributor to ethical problems. Accordingly, we need to examine the environment.
The second and more important reason for the Constitutional Council to appropriate the roles of the ethics committees is to tighten up on the rules for ethical behavior and convert the legislative environment from one overshadowed with suspected shadiness to one where honorable behavior might be expected.
In December of 2011 Peter Schweizer introduced to the public his new book: Throw Them All Out. In it he documented how numerous members of Congress were getting rich – some of them, extremely rich – trading on privileged information – not exactly insider information, but related to it -- to which they have extraordinary access. The general response from the acquisitive legislators was that they were all in compliance with their own lax rules of ethics, and initially they treated the whole matter with a collective shrug of indifference. However, the public outcry was so severe that Congress dusted off and up-dated an old unpassed bill called the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge ACT (with the acronym of STOCK), which had been sloughed off and ignored since 2006, and quickly passed it almost unanimously as a bipartisan bill that prohibits members of Congress from using non-public information for financial gain. So did Congress actually clean up its ethics this time? Of course, not!
“While the STOCK Act may stop legislators from using specific, private information to benefit themselves or their families, it doesn't stop them from changing their investment portfolios after meetings with Federal Reserve and Treasury Department officials or from trading in the companies that lobby bills before their committees. Somehow this information is considered ‘public.’” (The Washington Post 27 June, 2012)
Furthermore, “the law does not… limit elected officials from owning stock in industries they oversee. It also did not include the 48-hour reporting requirement that Baird (STOCK’s originator) had originally sought. Instead, lawmakers, their staffs and top executive branch officials must now report stock trades within 45 days.” (The Washington Post, June 24, 2012)
“Any sensible American would say that these lawmakers ought to know better.
“Until Congress tightens its rules, including with a more effective disclosure process, Americans will have to live with an uncertain image of their legislators: Are they the public servants they make themselves out to be, or are they self-servants as well?” (The Washington Post June 27, 2012)
When the whole body of legislators harbor a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I attitude, it easily engenders a disposition for lax ethics, which in turn set the door ajar for ethical dissemblers to entertain and invent ever lower definitions of what constitutes marginal and sub-marginal ethical behavior. The role of the Constitutional Council is to draw up rules of genuinely ethical conduct and to enforce them equitably (more about that here) without regard to party or seniority. The need for this is clear, and should be incontrovertible. The immediate effect will be to improve the level of integrity expected of legislators, and the long-term effects will be to clean up in a significant way the reputation of the legislature and the quality of its work. As long as corruption dominates our government and is a prominent election issue, it will be difficult for the Republic to concentrate properly on the sorts of issues that should be the primary concerns of the electorate. And it will also be practically impossible to attract to elective office people of scrupulous integrity, who would prefer not to jump into an environment where gentlemen are expected to finish last. It is even possible that the Constitutional Council assuming authority over the ethics of the legislature could result in noticeably more statesman-like behavior of Senators and Representatives and the nature of the laws that they draft and pass. Such a transformation would have to occur organically; it would not be the direct result of the activities of the Constitutional Council, but it could be a possible indirect result.
This is well written and thought out
