January 20, 2006, 8:21 a.m.
A $20 Plan
The culture didn’t change at the Library of Congress.

By George Neumayr

The picture on the front page of Thursday’s Washington Post showed a cluster of grinning Democrats crouching eagerly toward a table at the Library of Congress on which their new “ethics” plan to eradicate the GOP “culture of corruption” had been unveiled. They looked quite pleased with themselves as Senator Harry Reid and Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi signed it. This is what passes for congressional ethics among them: not exercising power and spending money justly, responsibly, abstemiously, but appearing at a photo-op to pledge a newfound commitment to “ethics.”

“Ethics,” at least in the mouths of politicians, is a weasel word to begin with. Its currency derives chiefly from the unwillingness of politicians to engage the term "morality." Pols prefer the more vague and technical-sounding word “ethics,” as it only binds them rhetorically to a set of professional rules that are usually pretty insignificant and silly, and certainly bear no necessary or intrinsic relationship to right and wrong. The triviality of the term is obvious in the press’s coverage of the post-Abramoff scramble in which the parties are competing childishly to advance the most stringent plan to regulate lobbying. As the Washington Post put it ludicrously, “in a sign that an ethical ‘arms race’ may be developing, the Democratic plans go further than the Republicans’ proposal.”

An ethical arms race? What does that mean? That Democrats and Republicans will for years to come be jostling with each other to see who can conform to the natural moral law more perfectly? That they are in a race to achieve a higher moral state? That if the Republicans commit themselves to, say, eight of the Commandments, the Democrats will commit themselves to all ten? No, apparently the ethical arms race will revolve around such weighty struggles as: Which party will give up baseball caps and coffee mugs from lobbyists? The Democrats, according to the Post, have surged ahead in the ethical arms race as they promise to abstain from even the $20 gifts the Republican plan permits.

“Mr. Abramoff and his associates will be held up as the beginning and end of our congressional crisis, but they are just the symptom of a larger problem,” Democratic New York Congresswoman Louise M. Slaughter told the Post. And the cure is a hastily faked-up ethics plan? Pretending to treat the symptom while deepening the disease is itself an illustration of a culture of corruption. The Democrats can’t bring themselves to acknowledge that the disease is a fat federal government and they have no intention of treating it. Excessive lobbying grew, and will continue to grow, in proportion to the very excessive government they champion and long to accelerate should they return to majority power. No ethics plan will change that.

As long as congressional ethics is divorced from an understanding of political philosophy that restricts Congress to undeniably federal tasks, the concept of “ethics” is worse than useless. It is just a cover for continuing the conduct that created the crisis in the first place.

Congressmen are comforted by the notion that ethics can be acquired through signing the proper piece of paper or hiring the right “ethics” counselors. Last year, after Tom DeLay’s troubles, the House held a refresher course on ethics. It lasted, according to press reports, about an hour. Learning how to sign the right piece of paper is a lot easier than forming virtues of restraint that would stop congressmen from proposing spending projects that the American people as a whole usually don’t see and certainly don’t need.

Ethics as an easy technical and isolated act — rather than as a habit formed through repeated action — is the comically barren notion that allowed Bill Clinton to proclaim that he planned to preside over the “most ethical administration” ever. Though he had no plan to make good on the promise, Clinton knew enough to pay homage to the post-Watergate reduction of ethics to the observance of a set of petty rules that made the good-government crowd proud even as the federal government under them ballooned and became more and more self-indulgent.

The “culture of corruption” began with Congress’s corrupt conception of itself as a special-interests vending machine — an organizing principle of bad behavior that the Democrats a long time ago turned into a political philosophy.

— George Neumayr is a writer living in the Washington, D.C. area.

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