Congressional Ethics as Partisan Warfare

I just saw this article about how Congressional ethics committee investigations are on the rise. I’m not sure I think that’s a good thing.

The idea that Congressional ethics enforcement makes Congress “better” is more controversial than most people let on. Some of the most productive legislators were considered “corrupt” — John Murtha, Dan Rostenkowski, even Wilbur Mills all had personal corruption issues. So what’s the actual point of ethics investigations in Congress? How are they supposed to make Congress better?

Is the point to hold members of Congress to some moral standard through strict regulation — to ensure that incorruptible men and women represent their constituents morally? Maybe, but that just makes the act of “doing corruption” more complicated. The more or less honest members who wish to do right by their constituents get punished, while those with “wheelbarrows of money”, or who use public service mainly to enrich themselves, get more vigilant about making sure their corruption passes muster — and get away with it.

Is the point to ensure moneyed interests don’t have too much influence? If so, what a failure. What’s the point of banning gifts to individual members while letting outside groups spend hundreds of millions of dollars on elections? That’s not entirely Congress’s fault, but it hasn’t done much to stop it either.

The fact of the matter is that modern ethics violations have become tools of the partisan warrior, used to tar and feather the other side. The good old boys have been purged even though they were often among the most ideologically moderate and most willing to make deals. The old-school dealmakers don’t really exist anymore; they’ve been replaced by ideologues. The thing about the casually corrupt is that they were the ones who got things done — they passed the president’s agenda, they made laws, they created the Great Society and the New Deal. Maybe they bestowed some inappropriate benefits on constituents, friends, or family along the way, but on net their efforts were a positive.

No one even wants to serve on the spending committees anymore, because those committees can’t really do much. The ones focused on “ideas” have paralyzed Congress with their ideological purity — they refuse to work together and have made the horse-trading needed to pass legislation nearly impossible.

This affects inter-party relations as well as intra-party ones. Even though Senate Majority Leader McConnell isn’t a dealmaker in the old-school sense, he’s relatively one compared to his colleagues — and any time he tries to work with the President, the ideological wing of his own party goes after him, even though he’s the one who said his main goal was defeating Barack Obama. He’s now annoyed the GOP by trying to govern.

The worst part of targeting people like John Murtha or Dan Rostenkowski is that they didn’t think they were doing anything wrong — it was just part of doing business. They were low-hanging fruit. Does Congress work better because they’re gone? No.