Gail Collins is making sense
October 8, 2009 4 Comments
This seems like it should be a bigger deal
August 20, 2009 7 Comments
I sincerely hope
July 17, 2009 8 Comments
In Defense of Corruption*
So is Murtha wrong for shamelessly funneling government largess to his beleaguered district? Well, yes, I suppose he is. But for all his faults, Murtha is a creature of the system. He wants to help his district. In an earlier era, he may have been a particularly effective ward boss or a successful small town mayor. Now, however, congressional earmarks have replaced local patronage as the best way to keep his constituents fat and happy.
Had Murtha acquired a similar reputation for creative financial disbursement as town mayor or state representative, I doubt he’d be villified by anyone. Earmarks, special expenditures, patronage – these things grease the wheels of local democracy. Moreoever, their proximity to the people who originally supplied the funds and voted the relevant elected officials into office gives them a special kind of legitimacy that national earmarks sorely lack . At the state or regional level, the connection between government spending and citizen welfare isn’t tenuous. To those of us outside Western Pennsylvania, however, the supposed benefits of the John P. Murtha Technology Center are less apparent.
Too often, critics of earmarks obsess over the latest in asburd congressional spending without examining their larger context. Murtha’s prodigious earmarks are symptomatic of real social needs that deserve to be addressed by elected officials. That these officials are best-positioned to act effectively at the national level is an indictment of our top-heavy political infrastructure, not an indictment of public welfare spending per se.
*This headline brought to you by Slate Magazine.
March 31, 2009 14 Comments
Celebrating Bribery, Extortion, and the End of the Secret Ballot
But the excitement over this strikes me as deeply misplaced. To sum up the news at that link, it would appear that the AFL-CIO has promised Senator Specter that they will “back him to the hilt” if he supports EFCA. There is some speculation that, should this happen, it would mean that Specter would switch parties and become a Democrat since the support of Big Labor would hurt him in a Republican primary he’s already got a very good chance of losing, whereas it would obviously help him quite a bit in a Dem Primary.
There is one really big problem with this scenario, though: it’s bribery, plain and simple. What we are talking about here is not your ordinary campaign contribution where there is at least theoretically the possibility (and in practice, the extreme likelihood) that the contribution is not in exchange for a particular vote or action by the elected official. No, what we are talking about is an explicit quid pro quo: the legislator’s vote on a specific issue for financial and political support in a re-election campaign.
But aren’t campaign contributions exempt from bribery laws? No – read the federal bribery statute, 18 U.S.C. 201. And while you’re at it, read the Hobbs Act’s extortion provisions. Admittedly, the Supreme Court has limited the reach of these anti-corruption laws to campaign contributions. But those limits are in place merely to deal with the realities of a privately-financed campaign system. They do not extend so far as to exempt explicit quid pro quo’s, which is exactly what we have here – by the union source’s own admission.
None of this is to say that I expect Specter or the AFL-CIO to get prosecuted for this should it become a reality – prosecutors are, so far as I know, pretty reluctant to go after politicians and organizations for bribery or bribery-related offenses when the value exchanged is campaign support and contributions. But publicly acknowledging that there is an explicit quid pro quo is probably the best way I can imagine to call a prosecutor’s attention to your actions (and to the elected official’s).
While we’re on the subject of EFCA, I just want to express my exasperation with the idea that the only reason to oppose EFCA is because one is anti-union. Let me provide a hypothetical that sums up the moral problem with card-check legislation: [Read more →]
March 13, 2009 38 Comments
