Misuse of Office/Special

Did you know that the District of Columbia has its own Speech or Debate Clause? I learned this from reading the Motion for a Protective Order on Behalf of Mayor Vincent C. Gray filed on Thursday in the case of Payne v. District of Columbia. Gray, a former council president, is seeking to be protected from testifying in a case involving alleged retaliation against a whistleblower. A...

Let's say you're a professional who wants to give something back to your community by serving on a city board or commission. You open up the newspaper and read that your mayor is saying, "It is not the five of us commissioners who make the city great. It's the citizens who are passionate about it, and now we're telling them, 'Sorry you can't serve.'"

Or the mayor is saying, "On certain boards we require professional experience. With what is now required by the Ethics Commission,...

Constituent service is a basic legislative role that I have pretty much ignored in my blog (click here to read the principal exception). Government ethics focuses too much on votes and self-serving conduct, and too little on the ways in which council members and other government officials help their constituents in special or inappropriate ways. Constituent service is central to Dennis F. Thompson's book ...

My second volume of summer reading is a classic, Dennis F. Thompson's Ethics in Congress: From Individual to Institutional Corruption (1995). Despite the book's title, Thompson (a professor at Harvard) has a great deal to say about government ethics that is equally applicable...

A very lengthy article in yesterday's News Journal looks at the history of relations between Delaware legislators and Christopher Tigani, formerly the top executive with Delaware's top liquor distributor. The article provides an instructive look at corporate and personal influence.

The story is summed up in a former state senator's...

It's not every day that an article about an insufficiently bid county contract appears on the front page of a major newspaper, but that's what happened today with the New York Times.

Insufficiently bid contracts are one of the most serious signs of corruption in local government. The requirement of competitive bidding of local...