County Related

Type the word "ethics" into the Birmingham, AL website search box and nothing comes up. Nor can you find the city's ordinances. Mayor Larry Langford bills himself as a great reformer, but he certainly hasn't done anything to reform the city's ethics laws, or at least to let anyone know about them. In fact, according to the City Ethics site, the ethics ordinance and board used to be on the city website, but the links no longer work...

There are two principal ways of dealing with gifts to government officials and employees, and both of them are unsatisfactory, although certainly better than ignoring them completely. One approach is prohibition, the other disclosure.

In Saybrook, IL, two members of both a sportman's club and a village board of trustees resigned their sportman's club membership so they would have no conflict voting on annexation of the club by the village. According to a letter to the editor of the Bloomington Pantagraph, the two members reserved their right to rejoin the club after the annexation issue was dealt with. Does resigning like...

According to an article in the Washington Post this week, a politics professor, David E. Lewis, looked at the Bush administration, comparing agencies run by political appointees and those run by career bureaucrats. Although the appointees tended to be better educated and very successful in the private sector, the agencies run by career bureaucrats showed "better strategic...

A Nevada court found yesterday that the state ethics commission did not have jurisdiction over a state senator on grounds of legislative immunity, even though the state constitution has no Speech or Debate Clause. The judge gave the senator a preliminary injuction to prevent his having to appear before the ethics commission next week. No decision is available yet, but the judge did say that the state constitution would have to be amended for the ethics commission to have jurisdiction over a...

Gift disclosure and limitations are an important part of government ethics. But rarely do we think of what gifts mean. Usually this goes little further than politicians saying, "I can't be bought."

But gifts aren't about buying. In fact, gifts are the opposite of buying, according to Lewis Hyde in his 1983 book, The...