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As a watchdog ethics lawyer who began this work during the Trump administration, thinking about what our generation's Earth-shattering Watergate will be keeps me up at night.
Continuing into the Biden administration, issues related to government ethics have dominated the news cycle, providing some of the most salacious and provocative stories about how money, power, and access work in Washington.
These ethics stories have dominated headlines for the better part of a decade. Supreme Court justices have failed to report gifts of lavish travel and free rides on private jets that have been recently uncovered by investigative journalists. Members of Congress have been accused of insider trading and failing to accurately file simple paperwork about their stock trades. Even Cabinet officials cozy up to their former lobbying employers and clients.
Stories that may not even appear to be about government ethics actually are because every policy decision made by SCOTUS, on Capitol Hill, or via the executive branch relies on the public's trust for legitimacy—while wealthy special interests jockey for their desired outcomes.
The problems before us are all so clear. So why, since the Ethics in Government Act (EIGA) was passed 45 years ago this month, have we seen so few meaningful reforms in federal government ethics laws? An unfortunate truth is that ethics law overhauls often have the best chance of passing in the wake of ethics scandals.
In the past, the public was made aware of an ethics problem and lawmakers—eager to retain the public's trust, and by extension, their own legitimacy—raced to pass legislation to fix the problem.
The Watergate scandal was enough to prompt a series of ethics reforms in the 1970s, including the EIGA. The Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal was enough to pass lobbying disclosure reforms in 2007 and to lay the corruption-ridden groundwork for the necessary Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) in the House. A 60 Minutes exposé on insider trading in Congress even provided momentum to pass the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act of 2012 (STOCK Act).
Since then, the tides seem to have turned—but not in the favor of accountability. The widespread and egregious ethics abuses that took place during the Trump era were not enough to prompt any real reform, nor have recent revelations of a Supreme Court justice being lavished with gifts by a billionaire with interests before the court. Not even revelations that a U.S. senator was allegedly taking bribes and conspiring to act as a foreign agent—for years, under the noses of his colleagues — prompted a resignation.
How bad do the scandals have to be before we say enough? When will we get the urgent, bipartisan ethics overhaul we deserve?
Past successes by previous congresses, along with public awareness of wrongdoing, may still be a way forward for more reform. Thanks to the STOCK Act's amendments to EIGA requiring real-time reporting, we now know when lawmakers have made suspicious trades—conveniently timed with closed-door briefings, or relative low-profile hearings. The only reason we can ensure members of the House of Representatives are investigated for ethics violations, and that voters have information about those investigations, is because Congress created and continues to authorize the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE), which makes reports of its investigations public.
The reason we have the transparency and accountability we do have, even if we can agree that it is not enough, is thanks to ethics laws that have been in place for a long time. We should seek to build on that foundation now.
The Supreme Court could make the decision to finally adopt a code of ethics, which all other members of the federal judiciary already abide by and some justices themselves are warming up to. Like the House, the Senate could also put in place its own independent and nonpartisan entity to produce ethics investigations. Even the EIGA itself could be updated to reflect the government ethics issues facing our nation today, which are far more complex than they were 45 years ago.
Some might say that the American public has become desensitized to ethics scandals given past and present ethics abuses and corruption going unchecked. If true, it is to the detriment of public trust in our major institutions. Even I am also not so naïve to the political realities that we face when trying to raise awareness of and implementing ethics reforms.
The current realities of back-to-back unprecedented ethics scandals prove that these reforms are now more crucial than ever. In the words of then-President Jimmy Carter when proposing the EIGA to Congress, voters have a right to know "that their government is devoted exclusively to the public interest."
We will get there through better disclosure, more meaningful enforcement, and stronger rules that bind our leaders to the law and public accountability. But for these things to materialize, our leaders need to act.
Delaney Marsco is a senior legal counsel at Campaign Legal Center.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
