In the news

The Council on Governmental Ethics Laws has great instincts for meeting where the ethics problems are greatest. Last year it met in Chicago. This year it will be Maricopa County, AZ (the Phoenix area).

See update below

Hiding a conflict of interest can lead to much worse problems than appearing before an ethics commission and getting your hand slapped, or even getting slapped with a fine. A criminal case in Winston-Salem, NC this week shows how bad things can get.

When I saw the headline from the Anchorage Daily News, "Palin Calls Blogger's Ethics Complaint Bogus," and saw that it had to do with clothing the governor wore, I thought I might write a piece about using ethics complaints for the purpose of political harassment. But when I read the article, I realized that the complaint was not frivolous, and that the governor's criticism of it was worthy of taking note...

I have treated the legislative immunity litigation in Rhode Island as the least relevant to other states and to local governments, because the ethics program was set up pursuant to a special constitutional convention. But an amicus brief filed this week by Common Cause of RI and the League of Women Voters of RI made me realize that a constitutional convention or, at the local level, a charter revision...

Ethics codes do not generally have rules about the involvement of spouses of government officials in citizen groups. But this can create serious appearance problems, as it has in St. Charles, Illinois, an hour west of Chicago, according to an article in yesterday's Chicago ...

There are two interesting developments going on in Texas right now, and two bills that will be heard in committee today.

One involves a request to the state legislature by El Paso County to allow local governments to give their ethics commissions teeth (they now can only censure).