The Horses are Out, Close the Barn Door

Today I heard a story about how the CEO of Boeing emphasized ethics in one of his meetings. At the start of the meeting, he held up a number. The assembled vice presidents and presidents of subsidiary companies scratched their heads about the significance of the number. Not long after the meeting started, the CEO told them what the number was: The former CFO's prisoner number. That drives home the importance of ethics in a very graphic way. Let's hope some bad apples in Washington join him for exercise in the yard very soon.

Today the architects of pay-for-play and the K-Street project unveiled their proposed ethics legislation. Dennis Hastert, Speaker of the House and one of the archtects of the culture of corruption that is Republican Washington, claims that the current scandals are lapses of existing law. Oh, well, one does tend to defend their own creation. One bright spot is that John McCain is going to be a part of the legislative process, although his fellow Republicans are currently attacking one of his masterpieces, the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Act, in the courts. Such is reform in Republican Washington. When it became apparent that McCain-Feingold would pass, Republican leaders, Hastert and Delay among others, attached measures to it to make it more vulnerable in the courts, in effect, strengthening the law to overturn it. Will we trust these to police themselves? These are the "leaders" who, when Tom Delay was chastened three times by the House Ethics Committee, gutted the committee's rules and then appointed a syncophant as chairman of the committee.

Still, the proposed reforms are a good start. Limit gifts to zero, keep lobbyists off the House and Senate floor and out of the gyms and cafeterias, make congressmen pay for their trips, these are meaningful. Eliminating earmarks - undebated grants of my tax money for bridges to nowhere in Alaska, would also help but what will help most of all is to throw the crooked bastards out of office. A Colorado state senator and a Republican summed up ethics best: Don't try to do what's best for the party. Do what's best for the state and you will do what's best for the party.

The names being tossed about are those I hold most likely to take a statesmanly approach to reform of Congress. It's just a shame it took Jack Abramoff and the Republican-created culture of corruption in Congress to bring them to the front. But remember, you can't have crooked lobbyists without crooked congressmen.