A worthy House measure to clamp down on members of Congress who employ relatives using campaign donations has disappeared into the maw of the Senate. A nonprofit watchdog group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, may have come up with a reason why. It has uncovered at least 20 senators who have paid out more than $500,000 in campaign funds to family members since 2000.
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The House bill, passed last summer and sent to the Senate, is itself only a half-loaf measure. It would ban the use of political donations to pay spouses, but it would allow these funds to be used to hire other family members, as long as those payments are fully disclosed. The House was shamed into acting by the Jack Abramoff Congressional corruption scandal, and by CREW?s revelation that 72 House members had spent $5 million in campaign funds to employ family members and their companies since 2000.
The Senate, at least so far, has been harder to shame. That is not entirely surprising, considering another discouraging CREW finding: that 31 senators ? nearly one-third of the Senate ? have one or more family members registered in the lobbying industry.
The Senate has also lagged on other ethics issues. Unlike the House, it still refuses to require electronic filing of its campaign finance data. It clings to an old slow-motion paper system that builds in months of obfuscation by requiring print records that have to be scanned and e-mailed to election officials, who in turn have to do their own processing and printing before the information is publicly available. Senate Republican leaders have, scandalously, been blocking a good bill that would force campaign reporting into the digital age.
The ethical issues here are not hard. Congressional campaigns, which these days are awash with millions of dollars in special-interest contributions, should not be seen as an opportunity to hand out cash to relatives. If Congress cannot muster the ethical fortitude to rein in these familial emoluments, the very least it should do is require members to disclose them up front and expeditiously, so taxpayers do not need to wait for groups like CREW to publicize their conflicts of interest.
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