Post-Employment/Revolving Door

Lax post-employment provisions can come back to haunt high-level
officials. They may have been thinking of their futures and those of
their close colleagues when they opposed laws that would require
them not to represent anyone before the government for a year or two
after leaving public service. But when one of their close colleagues
takes advantage of the resulting hole in the post-employment provision and becomes a lobbyist, it
reflects poorly on the high-level official in two ways. The official

According to <a href="http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/02/20/a-revolving-door-in-washington-t…; target="”_blank”">an
article in yesterday's New York <i>Times</i></a>, U.S. Senate majority leader
Harry Reid's spokesman said with respect to questions regarding his
hiring of a tax adviser away from General Electric, "The impulse in
some quarters to reflexively cast suspicion on private sector

At the Institutional Corruption Conference sponsored by Harvard's
Safra Center last Saturday, Bruce Cain, a professor at UC Berkeley,
pointed out that the permeable boundary between government and
business (and, I would add, business law) brings into government
many individuals who have a different concept of ethics. That is, in
the business world, loyalty to one's supervisors (or clients) and to
the company is the most important thing. In government, loyalty
should be to the public. Of course, this is not loyalty as we know

<br>
The COGEL conference last week had an excellent panel on the revolving
door between government and business. One thing I learned is that the
first post-employment laws were passed in the 1850s and 1860s, and they
involved lawyers, a group that often argues that ethics laws should not
apply to them (in fact, in Pennsylvania, someone said, revolving door
laws cannot be applied to practicing attorneys). The idea of a
cooling-off period after government service originated in 1955, well

This week the <a href="http://cogel.org/&quot; target="”_blank”">Council on Governmental Ethics Laws</a> (COGEL) met in Washington,
D.C. and, as usual, I learned about a lot of cases and matters I didn't
know about. I will be sharing some of the more
important of my new revelations in blog posts over the next couple of
weeks.<br>
<br>

(In a debate about a revolving door provision, also known as a "cooling
off period")<br>
<br>
<b>"You do not take pizza from the oven and put it straight in your
mouth. I believe that we should not take our
legislative service and put it right in our own mouth."</b><br>
<br>