29 July 2023
Healthy skepticism of authority is a very good thing — as power should never go unchecked in a democracy. But corrosive distrust of government of, by and for the people is a very bad thing — because pervasive cynicism, the reflexive belief that those we elect and the public servants beneath them have ulterior motives, leads to disengagement and division and drift. We therefore commend, with caveats, two legislative pushes in Washington to ensure that federal officials do more to earn the trust we put in them.
The first is by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, whose bill on Supreme Court ethics last week won the assent of a slim majority of the Judiciary Committee.
Every member of the federal judiciary has to follow a code of conduct — with the exception of the nine men and women who sit on the highest bench in the land. That’s akin to referees calling fouls on every basketball player except those who make the All-Star team.
In the wake of revelations that Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito received and never disclosed big-money gifts from wealthy donors, Whitehouse’s bill is modest. So as not to interfere with a coequal branch of government, it doesn’t prescribe what that the Supreme Court’s code of conduct should be; it simply requires justices to adopt a code; create a mechanism to investigate alleged violations; and improve disclosure and transparency when a justice has a connection to a party in a case before the court.
That’s the least the immensely powerful members of the most exclusive club in America can do to show a healthy respect for the rest of us — but congressional Republicans are dead-set against the legislation, treating it as a partisan attack. Don’t they realize that by taking that posture, they only feed the very distrust of the court they lament?
Fortunately, a second attempt to protect the integrity of federal officials is bipartisan. Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand and Josh Hawley — he who fled the Capitol on Jan. 6 after raising his fist in a show of solidarity — are working together to ban individual stock ownership and trading for members of Congress, senior executive branch officials, and their families.
We worry about the ramifications of telling anyone with any market holdings that they can’t serve in the legislative or executive branches, not even if they keep their investments at arm’s length; that would rule out service by a slew of successful, talented people. So we’d rather see the legislation modified to allow blind trusts to trade in securities, provided the people in power have no knowledge of what’s being bought and sold and when.
But we’re all for bolstering the prohibitions already in place. Though it’s technically against for lawmakers to trade on material nonpublic information, such a ban is hard to enforce — and does next to nothing to prevent, say, someone with a pile of tech or oil or agriculture or financial company holdings from benefiting from favoritism toward the industries whose rules they write or implement.
Voters should have no doubt that the people who run their government are making decisions based on their best understanding of what’s in their constituents’ interest, not based on what may line their personal pockets.
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