When I was 12, I watched my stepfather bribe an airport police officer to get us to the front of a very long baggage checking line. I remember feeling like we'd cheated, like we were unfairly bilking the other customers who didn't have $20 bills in their pockets. These days, as I read about lawmakers and lobbyists in the Abramoff investigation who cheated using hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxpayer money, my capacity for self-criticism somehow fails me.
It's been over nine months since lobbyist Jack Abramoff pleaded guilty to defrauding Native American tribes, corrupting public officials and engaging in fraudulent dealings with a casino cruise line, prompting an ongoing investigation into dozens of Washington, D.C., insiders. This past Friday, after repeatedly denying any wrongdoing, Rep. Bob Ney, R-Ohio, finally admitted to making false statements, conspiring to commit fraud and violating lobbying laws. As the first lawmaker in the investigation to admit criminal acts, Ney's confession marks a milestone in the public's ever-broadening understanding of Washington's disease of corruption.
Ney's crime was, simply put, to make illegal exchanges. In return for political donations and reduced-price vacations to New Orleans and New York, Ney rewarded one of Abramoff's clients with a multi-million-dollar government contract for wireless communications. The latter deal, had it been conducted legally, would be known as a "pet project" or "pork-barrel project," usually involving the exchange of political contributions and money for government contracts, or "pork."
Congress' response to such corruption has been pitiful. The day before Ney's confession, the House passed the last resolution in an all-but-abandoned series of lobbying and ethics reforms prompted by the Abramoff scandals. The new resolutions require representatives to attach their names to some, though not all, of their pet projects. The resolution expires at the end of the current session in three weeks, and, despite that obvious weakness, certain members of the House Appropriations Committee are complaining. I feel for them. Three whole weeks of semi-transparency in government can be very exhausting.
This is all they are doing, mind you: disclosing information. They're not even limiting pork, despite a clear economic justification: pork-barrel projects are generally more expensive and worse-regulated than projects whose contractors are chosen based on merits, not bribes.
Even more sadly, though, lawmakers remain unwilling to identify the real nature of this virus. The public's focus should not be on the corruption-as-investment strategy so much as the elitist entitlement that breeds it. Indeed, the most notoriously corrupt politicos all hail from patrician backgrounds. For example, Texas Republican Rep. Tom DeLay's father was a big player in the petroleum and natural gas industry, while Abramoff's father had ties to Ronald Reagan, a fact Abramoff often exploited while networking his way to power in Washington. Both gentlemen have firm goals: DeLay's is "to bring us back to the Constitution and to (God's) Absolute Truth that has been manipulated and destroyed by a liberal worldview" while Abramoff hopes "to remove (the left) from power permanently." Most importantly, both concluded that they were above the law and that the ends justified the means.
How do we level the playing field to encourage the less wealthy, well-connected people to run for office? How do we give honest politicians a fighting chance against the DeLays of the world? I suggest two policies for reform that exist in virtually every other industrialized democracy but ours:
Publicly finance federal elections
With this mechanism, no longer must political candidates be rich or have rich friends. Instead, they merely have to demonstrate broad grassroots support and agree to a spending limit in order to receive public funds. These public funds usually match the amount spent by privately funded candidates. Such a measure in the United States would be revolutionary. The public buys the politicians so the special interests won't. The strength of a reform can usually be assessed by the status quo's resistance to it. California Proposition 89, which would create full public financing of state elections in a state that comprises that world's fifth largest economy, has an unprecedented alliance of corporations and unions in an uproar.
Give free air time to candidates
Before the FCC Commissioner during the Reagan administration declared television to be just another more commodity - a "toaster with pictures" as it were - and deregulated everything, there was the Fairness Doctrine. Among other provisions, it gave all candidates in a race some amount of air time to express their respective platforms.
In the words of DeLay, "money is the lifeblood of politics." Money buys speech in politics, making some would-be candidates inaudible. It doesn't have to be that way. Think of these mechanisms as a form of financial aid, an investment in a new structure of political ascendance conducive to economic justice and moral integrity. Unfortunately, Congress stubbornly clings to a narrow interpretation of the Abramoff scandals in order to avoid responsibility to enact meaningful reform.
Kailin Clarke '07.5 just wants an alternative to disclosing his egregious pork intake.
