Campaign Finance

Sometimes, conflicts are built right into ethics laws, partly because it is in the political interest of those with conflicts, and partly because they don't even view those laws as ethics laws.

Reading the Supreme Court majority and dissent opinions in McComish v. Bennett (attached, see below; actually Arizona Free Enterprise Club's Freedom Club PAC v. Bennett at the Supreme Court level) is a very jarring experience that I highly recommend to anyone interested in government ethics. One opinion presents the world as we know it. The other opinion exists in a different world, a world without action and inaction on the part of legislative officials that can be tied directly to contributions in support of their campaigns.

Last month, the Obama administration drafted an executive order that would require those seeking federal government contracts to disclose their political contributions, and those of their directors, officers, affiliates, and subsidiaries, made in the two years before they bid for a contract. This draft executive order has been the subject of a great and unusual controversy.

This is a very serious blog post, but I want to start it with a game. Here are the headlines of stories that are said to be "related" to an article on the WLTX website yesterday relating to local government ethics in South Carolina:

• Naked Woman Creates Ruckus on Delta Flight
  
• Latest Forecast Update on Storm Potential

Local governments cannot afford to do the level of due diligence that corporate compliance offices do on a regular basis. But it is worth looking at how corporate compliance offices and corporate executives deal with other entities that are found to be involved in unethical activities.

In a Pay to Play Law Blog response to my recent blog post on a discussion that had appeared in the Pay to Play Law Blog, the argument is made that pay-to-play laws that go beyond disclosure, such as prohibiting campaign contributions from government contractors, set up a slippery slope toward the undermining of constitutional rights and toward higher compliance costs by law-abiding companies. This argument turns out to be a logical fallacy, which allows me to get bac