Conflicts

One of the things that always fascinates me is that, while politicians have no problem asking experts legal, financial, engineering, or human resource questions, they feel they know what they need to know about government ethics questions.

Take D.C. council member Vincent Orange. According to an article yesterday on the WAMU-FM website, for the third time he introduced a...

Update: June 20, 2012 (see below)

The saying goes that there are two sides to every story. But more commonly there is a story and ways to spin the story. The problem is telling them apart.

This week, a Daily Oklahoman editorial took to task the state ethics commission, which has jurisdiction over local officials. The editorial's...

Independent agencies are more likely than regular government agencies to get into trouble, because they are usually more closed and less supervised. And yet officials too often listen to agencies' calls for independence from ethics programs, as if the "independence" meant something positive that should be respected, rather than that the agencies are unsupervised and unaccountable. An independent agency's independence is only something positive when it is a watchdog agency, like an ethics...

What does it mean to be a "high-caliber" nominee for a position on a local ethics commission? Does it mean someone who has been in law enforcement, a prosecutor or judge whose presence sends the message that the law will be enforced? Or does it mean someone who appears to be independent of the local government officials who are under the commission's jurisdiction?

This issue is raised by...

Update: July 17, 2012 (see end of this post)

Here's an interesting conflict situation from Concord, NH. According to a recent article in the Concord Patch, a state representative filed ethics complaints against Concord's mayor and one of the city's council members. Since the mayor and city manager had not selected members for the city's ethics board, which was...

A poor and disconcerting judicial decision on local legislative immunity came down on May 24 from the U.S. District Court for the District of Kansas, Kickapoo Tribe v. Black.

The tribe made the argument in its brief that a watershed district...