The petty ethical transgressions that finally brought down House Speaker Jim Wright last week are a pimple on the nose of a body politic racked by the cancers of legalized corruption, moral laxity, and political cowardice.
Lancing the pimple does nothing to cure the cancers. Indeed, the unseemly haste with which Wright (D-Texas) was hustled overboard is one symptom of the political cowardice of many of his colleagues who are themselves steeped in the legalized corruption of honoraria, free trips, and campaign contributions from monied interests. They hope that the ravening beast of media fascination with the seamy side of congressional ethics can be sated by the ritual sacrifice of the speaker, along with the self-immolation of House Democratic Whip Tony Coelho (Calif.), the fund-raising prodigy who impaled himself on a messy $50,000 junk-bond investment.
But only those who cannot see the forest for the trees find anything uniquely shocking in Wright’s ventures down the slippery slope of sleaze.
The purging of the speaker and any others alleged to have violated the ethical rules will have been a largely empty and hypocritical exercise unless Congress does something about the kinds of graft that the rules allow.
As a legal matter, the case against Wright is quite weak on the main charge of violating House standards by taking $145,000 in alleged gifts (his Wife’s salary and the use of a condominium and a car) from his friend George Mallick, a Fort Worth developer, between 1979 and 1988, The rules bar acceptance of large gifts only from those with a more "direct interest in legislation" than Mallick seems to have had by virtue of his oil, gas, and real-estate investments. Distasteful as it may be for a House speaker and his wife to have a sugar daddy, there is no clear evidence that Wright ever used his influence to enrich Mallick.
On the other hand, Wright’s alleged transubstantiation of speech honoraria into book royalties to evade the limits on honoraria looks like a sham so transparent as to violate the rules. Even so, Wright’s supposed misdeed was not that he took honoraria from special interests but that he took too much. Those alleged violations yielded him only $7,712.
This comes to about one-fortieth of former Interior Secretary James Watt’s $300,000 consulting fee for his far sleazier but apparently quite legal peddling of his influence with then Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Samuel Pierce Jr. on behalf of a Rhode Island housing developer.
Rules aside, the record suggests that Wright is neither driven by extraordinary greed-after all his years in power, his personal assets are quite modest-nor more compromised by conflicts of interest than are most of his colleagues.
Shadow of the True Crime
The moral of the story is not that Wright is ethically fit to be speaker. Nor is it that members of Congress are by nature an unusually venal group.
The moral is that Jim Wright’s transgressions pale by comparison with the institutionalized corruption that pervades the entire practice of getting elected to Congress, getting re-elected, and supporting oneself while there. Most of this corruption, like Watt’s influence-peddling, is entirely legal. And nearly everyone in Congress takes part.
This systemic corruption-paid for by special interests that have no reason to lavish money on members of Congress other than the hope of influencing legislation- includes: personal financial benefits and favors such as honoraria and special investment deals, freebies such as all-expense-paid trips to resorts where members of Congress do a token amount of public business, and campaign contributions from political action committees and wealthy individuals.
The very standards Wright is accused of violating sanction a shameful regime in which members regularly supplement their personal incomes by taking money, mostly speech honoraria at up to $2,000 a pop, from special interests angling for legislative support.
A random example: Rep. James Hansen of Utah, one of Wright’s tormentors as a Republican on the ethics committee, took honoraria in 1988 totaling $17,000 from the General Dynamics Corp., the Grumman Corp., the McDonnell Douglas Corp., Colt Industries Inc., the United Technologies Corp., the Northrop Corp., and other defense contractors. Hansen happens to be on the House Armed Services Committee.
More than 90 House leaders approached or surpassed the $26,850 in honoraria allowed under House rules. Those standards restrict outside earned income to 30 percent of the $89,500 congressional salary; any excess is generally given to charity.
Flimsy Legal Fiction
As for campaign donations, the whole system is distinguished from the crime of bribery only by the flimsiest of legal fictions. Contributors, it is said, are buying access, not influence; and so many competing special interests ante up that they tend to cancel one another out.
But access is a thing of value, an opportunity to influence votes. That’s why monied factions are willing to pay so much for it. And even if some PAC contributions are offset by those made by competing interests, it still leaves the members beholden to groups with plenty of money, and commensurately less responsive to those with less or none at all.
Aside from affecting votes, special-interest donations- their importance magnified by the soaring costs of campaigns in the television era-are largely responsible for the patently unhealthy 99-percent re-election rate for representatives. According to Common Cause, PAC contributions to House incumbents for the 1988 elections totaled $82 million, compared to $9 million given to challengers.
Democratic incumbents averaged $217,108, more than 20 times the average of $10,762 received by their Republican challengers. This last statistic is largely the work of Democratic Whip Coelho, who as chief fund-raiser for the House Democrats mastered the art of persuading monied interests that possess an ideological affinity with Republicans to pay their dues to Democrats in power-in other words, the art of legal extortion.
Reform Easy in Theory
What is the remedy for all this? It is impossible to remove special-interest money entirely-from congressional campaigns. But adoption of some public financing of congressional elections might greatly reduce the impact of special-interest contributions.
So far public-funding proposals have been stalled because incumbents are so well-served by the existing system and because Republicans are used to thinking that the monied groups are on their side. Perhaps the growing Republican realization that PACs serve to perpetuate Democratic control of the House will change the political equation.
Cutting off the flow of honoraria and other special-interest money into members’ personal coffers is easy, at least on paper: Congress should simply bar members from accepting such favors from non-relatives who have any stake in legislation, direct or indirect.
Congressional reluctance to take this step has less to do with corruption than with political cowardice. Members find their $89,500 salaries inadequate for their personal wants. Yet they chickened out of giving themselves a raise a few months ago in the face of the furies of public indignation roused by consumer activist Ralph Nader and his allies. So they are loath to give up any chance to cadge a few thousand bucks on the side from those seeking access.
The public is dead wrong about salaries. It is ignorant of the high costs of living in Washington, D.C., while maintaining a residence in one’s home state. And people are being unrealistic to expect that top-notch individuals will enter public life when the compensation is such a small and shrinking fraction of what they can earn in the private sector.
The public, which also votes with Pavlovian regularity for the candidates that raise and spend the most special-interest money, is receiving the kind of government it deserves. While it shows no signs of coming to its senses on the salary issue, perhaps it will redirect some of its scorn toward the real sleaze of honoraria. Congress should abolish that special-interest dole in any event. For once, the members should also lead the voters, rather than follow them, and vote a big federal pay raise, effective after the 1990 elections-even if that means putting their 99-percent re-election rate at risk.