The recent revelations that Councilmember Marion Barry (D-Ward 8 ) funneled a city contract to his on-again-off-again girlfriend (Mr. Barry canceling and renewing the contract in sync with the relationship’s woes) has brought about a need to strengthen the city’s ethics laws.  Though conflict-of-interest laws prohibit giving contracts or positions to member’s of an official’s own household (the law defines this as immediate family), there is no restriction against giving contracts to girlfiends or boyfriends, who may in fact share interests and advantages akin to those of legal family.

Though using public funds to enrich one’s boyfriend or girlfriend (or mistress— Mr. Barry, “standing moral compass of God” is still married to someone else, lest we forget), may not be illegal, but it is unethical.  Public faith in good government rightly erodes at the sight of people of questionable qualifications reaping public benefits simply for being in bed with the powerful (in this case literally).

Mr. Barry, when asked if he would award city money to a girlfriend, responded, “Unless the law changes, why not?”

Mr. Barry’s ethical lapses are frequent enough that such a remark should not come as a surprise.  During his mayoralty, crime in the District soared, schools soured to become some of the worst in the nation, and people fled the city just so they could receive decent government services.  In 1990 Mr. Barry was arrested and caught on camera smoking crack in a hotel room with a woman who was not his wife.  Recently it was revealed that Mr. Barry failed to file Federal tax returns for eight of the last nine years and had also neglected to file city tax returns.

No one who so carelessly disregards the tax law should be in a position to determine how public funds are spent.  Nobody is above the law and it is time the city codify this principle further.  We propose the city council enact the following law to ensure that anyone running for elected office in the city has filed all tax returns as required and does not owe any outstanding debts to the city.

WHEREAS equality before the law and obedience to the law are necessary for a fair and free society, two requirements listed below will be added to D.C. Code § 1 – 1001.02 defining “qualified electors.”  For the general election following the ratification of this bill, a “qualified elector” will be defined as a person who meets the existing requirements and

1. Who has filed all tax returns to the District government as required; and
2. Who is not delinquent in the payment of any taxes, fees, or judgments to the District government.

The District of Columbia Board of Elections and Ethics will certify these additional requirements.

President Obama’s recent decision on the torture memos (to release the memos, but not to prosecute the authors), though dissatisfying to many, is politically a good compromise.  It partly addresses the need for accountability for Executive Branch abuses by exposing public officials and their support of torture.  The president’s decision not to investigate and prosecute further, though not the ideal solution to upholding the rule of law, will spare the country and Congress from a protracted political argument that would prove to be a needless distraction.

Though some in the administration have justified the end of the torture policy as a way to deprive al-Qaeda and its sympathizers of a recruitment tool, it’s hard to believe that suicide bombers are recruited to their cause solely because of a far-off country’s limited violation of the Geneva Conventions.  That said, it is hypocritical for the former vice-president Dick Cheney to demand the full release of all the memos that might suggest the efficacy of torture.  During much of his tenure, he defended the administration’s secrecy as necessary for national security.  How quickly he changes his mind when it suits his political opinion.

Even if CIA records reveal the efficacy of torture (we believe the CIA can probably torture information out of a suspect provided they find the right suspect), that does not make it right.  Mr. Cheney’s utilitarian argument for torture is wrong: we cannot sacrifice human rights in the pursuit of terrorists.

We agree with the president’s decision—certainly a difficult decision for him—to move on.

We never thought we’d agree so ardently with Joseph Stiglitz, but he appears to be among the few voices on the Left willing to call out President Obama on the flimsier elements of his economic plans.

We have noted before (to deaf ears, alas!) that the Obama Administration is no stranger to Wall Street.  Not only did Wall Street types donate twice as much to his campaign than to McCain’s, but Mr. Obama then hired Larry Summers as his chief economic adviser.  Before returning to Washington, Mr. Summers, as we noted earlier, “earned” a princely $5.2 million advising the hedge fund D. E. Shaw one day a week for the past two years.  (Talk about lavish executive pay!)

Anyway, Stiglitz, too, has pointed out the blatant conflict of interest in the administration:

“America has had a revolving door. People go from Wall Street to Treasury and back to Wall Street,” he said. “Even if there is no quid pro quo, that is not the issue. The issue is the mindset.”

Stiglitz is also critical of the administration’s stimulus package, since only a fraction of it is destined to be spent in 2009.

Candidate Obama rightly criticized President Bush for hiding the costs of the Iraq War through supplemental appropriations bills, rather than including the costs in the normal budget.  Alas, Mr. Obama is pulling yet another page from Bush book: though Mr. Obama recently included Iraq spending costs in his latest $410 billion budget, he has quickly come back for more, proposing his own $83.4 billion supplemental to fund operations in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as a few international aid programs.

Though there’s nothing necessarily wrong with requesting supplemental funding, the president’s request raises two concerns.  For one, requesting this money a mere month after Congress passed his buget makes one wonder why his budget analysts didn’t foresee these new costs and just include them in the original budget.  What’s more likely is that the president just wanted to send to Congress a bill with a lower bottom line so as to appeal to moderate Democrats and GOP deficit hawks (who only now have found fiscal religion).

Secondly, it’s hypocritical for the president to critcize his predecessor for a practice that he, himself, readily adopts once in office.

Larry Summers on ABC's This Week

As we have noted before, hedge funds, private equity firms, and their employees donated nearly twice as much to the Obama campaign as they did to the McCain campaign.  After the election, the new administration appointed some of its backers and friends on Wall Street to oversee TARP bailout money.  Few have given much scrutiny to this obvious conflict of interest until now.

On Friday the White House released the financial records of some of the administration’s top advisers.  As it turns out, President Obama’s chief economics adviser, Larry Summers, “earned” $5.2 million advising a New York hedge fund one day a week for the past two years.  Though the President desperately yelped to express his “outrage” at excessive AIG bonuses, he has remained conspicuously mum on the Mr. Summers’s lavish executive pay for such little work in an industry he now oversees.

Some have wondered why the administration has been so harsh on Detroit, threatening bankruptcy and executive firings, while only gently nudging Wall Street banks.  The fact that the administration has drawn so many warm suits and generous contributions from Wall Street suggests Mr. Obama holds his friends in finance to a milder standard.

When the Bush Administration let oil companies draft energy policy and let pharmaceutical lobbyists draft the Medicare drug benefit, Democrats cried foul, and rightly so.

Now Mr. Obama surrounds himself with smart bankers and economists who frequently spin around the revolving door between government and the finance sector, having made a fortune on risky bets and now seeing that the taxpayers are left to clean up the mess.

Public anger over the bonuses paid by AIG was well-deserved, but the resulting tax action by the House was unwise.

The House voted 328 to 93 on Thursday to confiscate via the tax code 90% of retention bonuses paid by recipients of TARP funds.  Though it is a moral hazard to reward bonuses for huge losses, the White House has even admitted that nothing in the TARP rules prohibits recipients from writing out such hefty retention checks in the first place.

Rep. Charles Rangel, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, the committee that writes the tax code, was at first possessed by a rare fit of good judgment in cautioning his colleagues against using “the [tax] code as a political weapon.”  However, as public outrage mounted, Mr. Rangel himself sensed which way public opinion was going and introduced the confiscation measure.  (Mr. Rangel himself is beset by his own tax, rent-control, mortgage, and car scandals, but that’s “none of your goddam business.”)

This tax risks poisoning the TARP program altogether since banks will balk at terms that require them to abrogate existing contracts and that force them to lose necessary talent to competitors. It also sets an example that all future business decisions are subject to political, not economic, scrutiny.  Though it is fair that recipients of public money be held to public standards of accountability—as politicized as that may be—it is important that Congress and the Treasury view these banks as investments; when they lose, the public loses.

Even if both houses pass the measure and the President signs it (his press secretary says he’s open to the idea), it will face Constitutional challenges in the courts for several reasons:

It is a bill of attainder, which punishes people or a group of people without the benefit of a trial.  Since Members of Congress have already publicly expressed that the purpose of the bill is to punish a particular group of people, they may have unwittingly proven the case to a court that their intention was never to set a national tax policy, but rather to react against an act that benefited a short list of people.

Similarly, the bill denies due process.  The Fourteenth Amendment stipulates that the government may not “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”  However unwise the bonuses were, they were lawfully distributed, and an explicitly confiscatory tax against this group of recipients without any sort of trial deprives the recipients of any sort of due process.

Furthermore, the tax is an ex post facto law, confiscating income already lawfully distributed.  Though Congress certainly has the authority to tax and to tax income already distributed (i.e. existing wealth), the power to tax involves the power to destroy, and there is no doubt as to the inention of this onerous 90% tax rate.

The bonuses amount to a tiny fraction of a sliver of the TARP, but as we have argued before, even a small portion misspent is still irresponsible.  Nonetheless, some commentators on the Right have labeled this row “cosmic myopia” and a “bonfire of the trivialities.”

Ideally, Congress and the Administration would tie future compensation packages to performance, but in the rush for due accountability, we cannot ditch the rule of law.

Photo: Susan Walsh, AP

The revelation of AIG’s extravagant bonuses is renewing calls for the Treasury to replace the leadership of bailed-out firms.  If these people brought their banks to such dire circumstances in the first place, so the thinking goes, they have proven their incompetence.  Fire them all, many say.

Though Monumentality hardly defends failed enterprises, one must wonder if the latest calls for executive firings would bring about the same calamity as de-Baathification did in Iraq.

When in 2003 the Coalition Provisional Authority, under L. Paul Bremmer, dismissed all senior officials of Saddam Hussein’s government, the result was a national Iraqi government devoid of leadership.  By categorically branding former officials as tainted, their replacements— a melange of political hacks, amateurs, and empty seats— ran the new Iraqi government FEMA-style.  We all know how that turned out.

Similarly, in the frenzy for well-deserved executive accountability at AIG and other firms, the Treasury should avoid repeating the mistakes of Baghdad.  Though executive boards and management (and the rank-and-file, too, to some extent) oversaw dodgy deals, they are ipso facto the people with the most knowledge of what deals need undoing.

Certainly it is possible for new-hires to gain the necessary institutional knowledge to lead these firm to a recovery, but it takes time.  Though the President is fond of solving all problems all at once, retribution and recovery are best served in separate courses.

The Treasury must not damage the viability of its (well, our) investments tomorrow for the sake of exacting a pound of flesh today.

Today The Post and the Gray Lady are publishing several good op-eds on Obama’s policies and methods.

Michael Gerson argues that Obama’s promise of change now rings hollow.  While Gerson’s criticism of Obama’s governing style and the Limbaugh affair are largely irrelevant, he rightly notes that the President is continuing with business-as-usual, i.e. promising everything for the price of nothing:

The pledge of “honesty” and “sacrifice” has become the deceptive guarantee of apparently limitless public benefits at the expense of a very few…. None of this is new or exceptional — which is the point. It is exactly the way things have always been done.

Charles Krauthammer argues that Obama’s stem cell and science policy is unsophisticated and contains a significant logical contradiction:

[The President declared] that we must resist the “false choice between sound science and moral values.” Yet, exactly 2 minutes and 12 seconds later he went on to declare that he would never open the door to the “use of cloning for human reproduction.”

Does he not think that a cloned human would be of extraordinary scientific interest? And yet he banned it.

Is he so obtuse as not to see that he had just made a choice of ethics over science?

Eugene Robinson defends Obama’s method of confronting all challenges (i.e. banking, health care, entitlements, infrastructure, education, etc., etc.) all at once.  He astutely dismisses the critics:

What these critics really want, though, is to delay or derail the progressive reforms that voters elected President Obama to carry out.

Judging by the scarcity of fiscal discipline over the past few years, it’s probably wise to characterize the opponents of the all-at-once agenda as really just opposing the agenda part, not the all-at-once part.

We, however, still hold by our belief that when governments rushes policy, the results are rarely wise (e.g.).

David Brooks (a conservative!) praises Obama’s nascent education policy as recognizing the importance of familial influence, teacher accountability, and charter school competition.  He writes that the President “has broken with liberal orthodoxy on school reform more than any other policy”.

Remember Sen. Obama’s campaign promise to examine the Federal buget “line-by-line” to eliminate wasteful spending and earmarks?  Shamefully, the president has gone back on his promise and instead signed the mammoth $410-billion omnibus spending bill.  An amazing 8,500 earmarks sit like barnacles on $7.7 billion of the bill.  One must suppose Senator Obama didn’t think it fair to impose burdensome campaign promises on President Obama.

While a presidential veto would have embodied the spirit of this new “era of responsibility“, the President has decided to play along to get along rather than ruffle the blue feathers at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.

Wait, haven’t we seen this movie before?

Ah, yes!  President George W. Bush waited five years to issue his first veto, preferring to work with Congressional Republicans quid pro quo.  The result was runaway spending and unexamined executive power.

Sadly, Pres. Obama had a chance to give us some change we could believe in.  The only change he gave us was his promise.

Robert J. Samuelson in the Post reiterates my point (though I doubt he reads Monumentality) on how the President’s budget, entitled A New Era of Responsibility, is anything but responsible.

If Obama were “responsible,” he would conduct a candid conversation about the role of government. Who deserves support and why? How big can government grow before higher taxes and deficits harm economic growth? Although Obama claims to be doing this, he hasn’t confronted entitlement psychology — the belief that government benefits once conferred should never be revoked.

Is it in the public interest for the well-off elderly (say, a couple with $125,000 of income) to be subsidized, through Social Security and Medicare, by poorer young and middle-aged workers? Are any farm subsidies justified when they aren’t essential for food production? We wouldn’t starve without them.

Given an aging America, government faces huge conflicts between spending on the elderly and spending on everything else. But even before most baby boomers retire (in 2016, only a quarter will have reached 65), Obama’s government would have grown. In 2016, federal spending is projected to be 22.4 percent of GDP, up from 21 percent in 2008; federal taxes, 19.2 percent of GDP, up from 17.7 percent.

I’m still waiting for a President willing to tell the truth: that we should pay the higher taxes necessary to fund the services we demand, or, more broadly, that we can’t always get what we want.

Now that would be an act of responsibility.

D.C. City Councilman Harry “Tommy” Thomas (Ward 5-much of northeast) is threatening to hold the advertisers of a small Brookland newspaper “accountable for [their] role in underwriting the Brookland Heartbeat.”

The newspaper’s “crime” was to report that Councilman Thomas isn’t that great at securing neighborhood improvements from the city government.  Thomas’s objections do not dispute any of the facts of the news story, which was widely distributed in Ward 5 in July.

Though Thomas’s letter stating his objections is obviously a political stunt, what is most worrying (and possibly illegal) is his threat to hold the paper’s advertisers “accountable,” without specifying what that means.

Does Thomas plan to exert undue pressure to deny these businesses their rightful licenses? Does he intend to send city inspectors on daily fishing expeditions to look for trifling violations?

This veiled threat is inexcusable and should be investigated by the appropriate ethics authorities in the city government. Such ambiguous threats run the risk of chilling political debate among citizens. Who will stick his neck out and rightly criticize those in power if losing his livelihood is a consequence?

I have emailed my Congressman regarding his opposition to passing a resolution to investigate $300 million in questionable defense earmarks arranged by a lobbying firm last year.

Richard Layman raises a good point on how government services are conceived and perceived:

Is public transit supposed to be a service of last resort for people who don’t own cars? Or is public transit supposed to be a system to enhance mobility by reducing the need and demand for automobiles, supporting urban economic development, reducing traffic and congestion, and getting very large numbers of people to places effectively and efficiently.

For a lot of places, government provision of services are focused on providing service to people without other choices. Maybe that inalterably impacts how service is provided?

Indeed, when particular government services are only offered to the weak and desperate, the public constituency for such services is only the weak and desperate. As a result, the services fall into neglect, disrepair, and mismanagement since the city’s influential elite and middle-class don’t have to face the problems of these mismanaged programs.

I’ve often wondered whether Washington’s Metrobuses would run better if the city’s councilmen had to ride them to work everyday. Clearly yes. However, the problem extends to other services as well. Another example is the city’s public school system, among America’s worst by most measures. Since the city’s elite and increasingly elusive middle-class are either childless or send their children to private school, they have only a passing, academic interest in the state of the city’s public schools. As a result, one will find that the system has pretty much become the school “option” of those who can afford no other option: families who can neither afford private school nor afford to leave the city for the suburbs.  Even Mayor Fenty doesn’t send his children to the city’s schools.

Likewise, I’ve frequently heard this concern of constituency voiced in opposition to means-testing Social Security.  If the rich and upper-middle class are excluded from receiving Social Security benefits (but not exempted from paying the taxes), they will loose interest in Social Security as a government program and the program will consequently suffer.  It is an argument that I believe is outweighed by other considerations (e.g. the system’s solvency and the unfairness of taxing lower-income earners to pay benefits to the rich), but the point is worth considering nonetheless.

Constituencies matter and when we design government programs, we must consider who will benefit and support them.  Congressmen, for better or for worse, have long realized this, passing ill-conceived and otherwise unpopular measures by attaching them to widely popular bills. If we want government programs to receive the necessary attention and support, we must include the interest of the powerful and politically active to ensure their health and survival.