Lawmakers seek cash during key votes
27th December 2010
Numerous times this year, members of Congress have held fundraisers and collected big checks while they are taking critical steps to write new laws, despite warnings that such actions could create ethics problems. The campaign donations often came from contributors with major stakes riding on the lawmakers’ actions.
I’m shocked, shocked I tell you.
It always astonishes me that anyone would find this ‘news’. The only reason anybody at all has to give money to a Congressman is in the hope that the Congressman will support legislation in favor of that person or group. The only reason such support is worth something is because a Congressman (or any other legislator or bureaucrat) has immense power to help or hurt someone in business. If they didn’t have that power, it wouldn’t be worthwhile to bribe them.
The answer to that is not legislation mandating ‘ethics’, because ethics aren’t self-enforcing and the enforcement is being left to people who are subject to the same temptation — you don’t have a committee of foxes look into whether a particular raid on a henhouse was ‘ethical’. The answer is to reduce the power of such people so that they are no longer worth bribing. But, of course, those who do most of the handwringing about ‘ethics’ aren’t willing to sacrifice the ability of such people to coerce the Common People into following the handwringers’ political agenda. So the system is broken and will probably never be fixed.