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In 2009, Congress appropriated $16 billion in earmarks. In March of 2010, that the House eliminated earmarks to for-profit companies. However, enterprising managers soon found a way to get around the restriction. I contend that figuring ways to get around restrictions is the default in corporate responses to regulations where the latter cannot be used for strategic advantage.

In Marcy Kaptur’s (D-OH) district, a defense contracting company incorporated a nonprofit organization, the Great Lakes Research Center, at the same address and doing the same work. The center received earmarks of $10.4 million to sell the Pentagon small hollow metal spheres for body armor. Kaptur, who had received tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from the owner’s family and the company’s lobbyists told the media that the center “met the requirements of the Reform.” If this is true, the reform was in effect nugatory—so one might ask: why did the House go to the trouble unless for the short-term PR benefit? There is a deeper problem in even the appearance of a conflict of interest wherein a lawmaker has a role, whether direct or indirect, in money going to an organization that has contributed to the lawmaker’s campaign. Even if not intended, the conflict of interest should be sufficient as a red-light, yet as long as money is not being used by the company’s owner for personal use, such conflicts of interest are typically ignored.  I contend, however, that both types are equally sordid and hence that we should be on guard for them both.  If I am correct, there is an unduly lax and restrictive attitude in the US toward institutional conflicts of interest. This lapse has in turn enabled corruption in the Congress.

Source: Eric Lipton and Ron Nixon, “Companies Find Ways to Bypass Earmarks Ban,” NYT (7/5/10), 1A.

See http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/05/us/politics/05earmarks.html?_r=1&hpw

The real means by which a bill becomes a law are sometimes referred to “how sausage gets made” because they are not suited for public display.  The belief is that were the citizens to see what goes on in the process, they would demand that it be changed.  For example, Rep. David Dreier, R-California, argued in March, 2010 in the US House that while “the process of lawmaking should be ugly, I have never seen it as ugly as it seems to be coming before us this week. … I think that [James] Madison would be spinning in his grave at the fact that there is absolutely no accountability to what is taking place here.” He was referring to the Speaker’s attempt to bypass a direct vote on the US Senate’s health-care bill by voting on a rule that would deem that bill passed in the House.  More generally, the ugliness in passing legislation refers to the horse-trading, which can include special favors and even payoffs.  For example, the US Senate’s health-care reform bill of 2010 includes a “Louisiana Purchase” and a special deal for Nebraska—both were engineered to obtain the votes of the two states’ senators.  I submit that the ethics in “how sausage gets made” is complex and depends on the particular means being referred to.

For example, take horse-trading where a representative votes against the preference of a majority of his or her constituents because they will get something else out of it.  The represenative judges that the typical constituent would agree to vote against his or her preference on the given issue because of the payoff to the district.  “I’ll go ahead and vote for health-care reform with a significant government role because we’ll get a new bridge.”  If the representative’s judgment matches those that the majority of his or her constituents, the sausage-making is not in this case unethical because the representative is indeed representing.
If most of the representative’s constituents would say no to the deal, then the yes vote would only be ethical if the representative judges correctly that the deal would be in their best interest.  Being a representative can justifiably depart from polls to act in his or her constituents’ best interest because this too represents them.  Were there no value in this, we would have a direct rather than a representative democracy.  There is in the latter a check on the passions of the people; the strength of check depends on the length of the term because an election further off gives the representative more time for the “in your best interest” to become evident.
The ethical waters darken appreciably the more the deal benefits the representative rather than the constituents.  A friend or relative getting a judgeship, for example, does not justify a vote that is at odds with the preference (or best interest) of the majority of the constituents.  This is essentially a principal-agent problem, where the representative is the agent who is not acting in the interest of his or her principal.  It is unethical because the agent has agreed to the duty of acting in the principal’s interests.

So sausage-making is not necessarily as sordid for the individual representative as it might seem overall.  An ethical representative need not fear discussing it.  In fact, making it transparent as part of the political discourse (through the media) would permit him or her to inform the constituents why he or she is making the deal.  There might be feedback ensuing that leads the representative to revise his or her assessment.  Of course, the representative might fear that the deal would unravel were it made public. However, it is unethical to include stealth deals in a public legislation.  A deal that is not agreed to in the light of day should not be part of a given bill because the majority voting for a bill should know what they are voting on.  There is nothing shameful in a deal that is in the interest of one’s constituents, and such a deal might be in the interest of the other representatives who want the bill to pass.  “We will give your people the bridge that is in their interest in exchange for their support on our bill here.”   This is essentially a recognition of legitimate priorities.  However, it can also be argued that a bill should stand on its own merits.

 Strictly speaking, if a majority of the representatives do not support the health-reform, for example, the bill should not be passed.  Proponents of a bill overreach in looking for deals to put them over the top because the majority vote with the deals does not match the merits of the bill apart from the unrelated deals.  Bad public policy can be enacted because some districts care more about other things.  In this sense, it would be ethical for the proponents to admit that they don’t have a majority and that therefore the bill ought not to pass.  Overvening such a normative constraint is the selfishness of “I want it my way anyway.”  This too ought to be part of the public dialogue when a majority is to be achieved only by the horse-trading.  However, the horse-traders could argue that including the deals reflects the priorities in the society, and these ought to be reflected in a legislature.  Ethically speaking, a legislature should design its sausage-making in such a way that such priorities are reflected even as they do not enable legislation that only a minority want on its merits apart from the priorities.  How to distinguish priorities from overreaching is the difficult problem facing us both ethically and in terms of legislative process.  Ah, but there’s the rub; what reforms would institute this messy ethical distinction?  Applied ethics may not be sausage-making, but it is messy nonetheless.

For Rep. Dreier’s quote, pls see: http://www.cnn.com/2010/POLITICS/03/16/house.health.care/index.html?hpt=T1

When I was a student at Yale, I was a member of the Party of the Right (POR) in the Yale Political Union (YPU). I was pretty much a libertarian back then, and the POR consisted of libertarians and Burkean traditionalists. John Kerry had been president of the YPU in 1968.  The Political Union consists of several “parties,” which are really little debating/drinking societies. The POR consisted of libertarians and Burkean traditionalists. I was a libertarian. I didn’t much like the guys in charge of the POR.  For one thing, the Burkeans dominated the positions, and they had their little club within the club though they were never man-enough to admit it. Also, the party owned a secret society, which is only open to men ostensibly because it had been a nineteenth-century men’s literary society before the POR took it over.  The trouble is that there are female members of the POR, and they are ineligible for membership in the party’s secret organization. I didn’t like that exclusion even though I am not a woman.  However, the unfairness wasn’t limited to women.  The only guys who were invited into the secret society were those who were in leadership positions of the POR. In the year that I joined the party, the chairman invited me to a Friday night party, which was being held in a room half way up Yale’s bell tower. He told me that the new members of the POR would be inducted into the secret society, so I should come.  So I canceled my other plans and attended. The truth was that he wanted all the party members to be at the party to serve as an audience for the two or three people in the party’s leadership who were actually being inducted. It is no fun being exclusivist if there are none of the excluded around to watch. In other words, the chairman lied to me.  I had changed my plans in order to go to the Friday night party, but it was the lying that really infuriated me when I discovered the actual purpose of the evening.  When I confronted the chairman, he (and his friends in the leadership) denied that he had told me that the new members would be inducted.  Most people who get pissed at the party leadership resign from the party in protest in order to make a point.  I think they overestimate the impact of their “act.”  I, on the other hand, did not resign; I simply ignored the party’s leaders on campus and did not attend any more POR functions.  I think that annoyed the “leaders” more than had I resigned. So even today, I’m a member of the POR, in spite of the fact that I am now very liberal on some issues. In hindsight, I wish I had joined the Progressive Party or the Independent Party while I was still a student, but I really was a libertarian then, and libertarians were in the POR.  The lesson I learned from the POR was how easily people in power can lie. That is a tradition that even the Burkeans can give up.

On January 10, 2011, former U.S. House Majority Leader Tom Delay (R-TX) was sentenced to three years in prison on charges of money laundering and conspiracy to commit money laundering for using a political action committee to illegally send corporate donations to Texas House candidates in 2002. Prosecutors claim the money helped Republicans take control of the Texas House. That enabled the Republican majority to push through a Delay-engineered congressional redistricting plan that sent more Texas Republicans to Congress in 2004, strengthening DeLay's political power. In the face of this charge, DeLay simply repeated his longstanding claim that he did nothing wrong. "I can't be remorseful for something I don't think I did," DeLay said in a 10-minute speech to the judge. This statement is not unlike those of John D. Rockefeller, when the monopolist of Standard Oil was accused in the late nineteenth century of restraint of trade.  Ida Tarbell, Rockefeller's chief critic, believed the titan was under a sort of self-delusion. It is possible that Delay suffered from a similar rationalization or state of denial denial. Just as Rockefeller, who attended Church more than once a week through his 90s insisted that things are right between him and his God, Delay pointed to his faith in Jesus as in effect rendering the verdict nugatory in terms of what really matters. To be sure, Delay probably did view himself as innocent of criminal conduct. "This criminalization of politics is very dangerous" he charged, "It's dangerous to our system. Just because somebody disagrees with you they got to put you in jail, bankrupt you, destroy your family."  Antithetically, Gary Cobb, the lead prosecutor, averred that Delay had "put his principles, ideals and beliefs above the laws of Texas." Particularly when one's religious beliefs are invoked along with a criminal defense (i.e., that it was politics that was being criminalized), one should be on guard against the possibility of self-delusion.  Both Rockefeller and Delay had immense power, and their respective views of the non-culpability bore on their use of power. The ends justifying the means allows for a slippery slope. Of course, in Delay's case one could simply look at the money exchanges and compare them to the law. According to The New York Times, "a jury determined that he conspired with two associates to use his Texas-based political action committee to send $190,000 in corporate money to an arm of the Washington-based Republican National Committee. The RNC then sent the same amount to seven Texas House candidates. Under Texas law, corporate money can't go directly to political campaigns." Yet as clear as this sounds, it is surprising how divergent Delay and Cobb are with respect to their interpretations. If we take the verdict as correct, and rather cut and dry, it might be troubling that Delay not only denied any culpability after the verdict, but went on to invoke his salubrious condition in terms of his religious faith. Such an invocation can easily turn into a justification, with the result being that great wrongs, such as wars, can be done in the name of a religion of love. Does religion itself support or enable its role in hypocrisy, or are there tools such that Rockefeller's pastor could have stood up to him as though a mirror to reflect the pride and duplicity or delusion back upon the titan who even as a teenager dreamed of money?

Source:  http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41006570/ns/politics-more_politics/ 

For more on the intersection of Rockefeller's commercial and religious roles and what this may imply regarding the Reformation and Christianity itself with respect to profit-seeking and wealth, please see Godliness and Greed, available at: http://www.amazon.com/Godliness-Greed-Shifting-Christian-Thought/dp/0739139835/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1294957599&sr=8-1