WASHINGTON REPORT: The Eccentricities of Ethics

...It is not unreasonable in such circumstances to assume that such fees are always offered and sometimes accepted as a kind of soft bribe, a payment not necessarily for specified legislative services, or, often more important, the service of blocking legislation, but rather as a gesture of goodwill with the expectation of goodwill in return...

...A code of ethics, after all, is something one believes in, or something the members of a given society subscribe to...

...alternatively: last year, I pushed this bill, it passed and because of my foresight, I made this much money...

...To such ends, the means adopted by both Houses are, it goes without saying, completely irrelevant...

...In fact, of course, he made much more than eight grand, but because he did nothing to earn it except prudently invest his capital in ventures his legislative efforts enhanced, he was held not culpable except for failure to inform his colleagues...

...In contrast, the taxpayer whose income derives from speculation of various kinds has two clear advantages over the working stiff...

...The way to ensure that happy state, obviously, is simply to require that they do so...

...Nor can cutting down the lecture schedule be justified on the ground, apparently sensible enough, that senators ought to spend more time on the job...

...Surely, there is the key to the whole question of legislative "ethics" imposed by a prudent self-regard by the body upon its members...

...As entertainment this TV Jesus has scored...

...Penalties to follow, to be sure, beginning not with wristslapping such as was administered to the said infamous Sykes, but with expulsion and going on to substantial fines and incarceration...

...another stage in the unending dialogue, one more interpretation--in a generation that has given us Jesus the Marxist revolutionary~ hippy and rock star--of what image of Jesus, for better or for worse, seems to be fitting for our time...

...and at that time, he gets to compute them himself with the aid of the lawyers and accountants for whose benefit the tax laws are largely written by other lawyers in Congress...

...The legendary senatorial weekend from Thursday to Tuesday was not created by nor is it sustained by the letch to lecture...

...God knows what the Ten Commandments would have looked like if composed by a committee of proto-Talmudic scholars, but perhaps an approximation may be glimpsed in work the ethics committees in Congress have been in labor to bring forth...

...Commonweal: 229...

...Even apart from the particular issues, there was a deep, shared concern that the bishops truly respond to the aspirations and grievances, the fears and hopes that welled up in all the meetings...

...and so on...

...But the first step is to compel the member to stand up in public and say, I have been pushing this bit of legislation...

...On the other hand, wealth gained by inheritance or by speculation is no problem and need not be dealt with by composers of Congressional Decalogues...

...In the collection of the income tax, the working stiff pays his taxes every week when he gets his pay check...

...The most recent case of a national legislator privately profiiting from legislation he sponsored was, of course, that of the infamous Sykes, of Florida, loyal servitor of the Pentagon's purposes, loyally rewarded with a banking concession on a base in his home district...

...an imaginative and lovely attempted reconstruction--with all kinds of authoritative advice--of a life that, from what we actually know, really can't be reconstructed...

...out of it, I stand to make this money...

...To be a valid religious experience it must move the viewer beyond the screen to the pages of the gospel where the real demands o f Christianity are made...

...In this sense the history of Christianity since the death of Jesus has, over the centuries, been an endless dialogue in which believers and would-be believers have struggled to answer both for themselves and one another the same question Jesus, in a moment of self-searching, asked about himself: "Who do men say that I am...

...actually very few of them would have done and there was never any question of informing his own constituency or the public at large of his interesting "linkage," as Henry Kissinger used to call these "comminglings," as Tom Dodd used to, of one interest with another...

...The new code of ethics would have forbidden Sykes to earn more than some eight grand a year serving as teller in his bank...

...Similarly, in the emerging code of ethics, the senatorial working stiff who works the Communion Breakfast-Women's Club beat takes a beating, while the senator who makes his in oil or aircraft stocks or any of a myriad of legislation-related ventures is encouraged to continue in these ventures, blessed with the knowledge that since they do not require his off-duty participation, everything is hotsy-totsy, ethics-wise...

...seriously we must see how his understanding of his mission and his identity grew, developed gradually throughout his public life, and that he may not have fully understood in what way he was the "Son of God" until he was face to face with the Father at the moment of his own death and "glorification"ujust as we too will understand the meanings of our own lives at that final encounter...

...FRANK GETLEIN COMING JAMES FINN surveys the "Call to Action" recommendations that the American bishops will be acting upon at their Spring meeting in Chicago: "As a delegate at the Detroit conference who was more than once in a minority position, I know that there were and are sharp differences among the many delegates and among the bishops...

...While any citizen is formally innocent until proven guilty, it would be absurd not to assume that the serious questions were not addressed because the legislative officers able to command or forbid such attention were positively interested in forbidding it, interested in keeping the real sources of potential corruption in operation, were insensitive, it may well be, to what constitutes corruption in what Daumier called The Legislative Belly...

...Surely it would not be an insurmountably difficult task for Decalogue devisers to spell out the difference between, say, $1,000 or even a couple, at a university and, say $15- or $20-thou at a trade association, a union convention or a gathering of the A.M.A., now as ever proprietor of the biggest lobby in town and the major reason this country's medical distribution system is so primitive, even capricious, compared to those in the other industrialized countries...

...Oddly enough, that distinction and getting the distinction exactly backwards parallels a similar distinction and upside down view of reality to be found in the income tax, a timely comparison for us all...

...to ensure that neither the individual legislator nor the legislative process is for sale, that the process is not manipulated for private gain by those in a position to manipulate it...

...In fact, of course, there is something to be said for senatorial lecturing as a part of the job...

...The serious questions have not been addressed...

...That simple formula could apply to farm supports, bills to ease the troubles of oil millionaires and, above all, the great handouts to the arms industries...

...WASHIHGTOH REPORT ECCENTRICITIES OF ETHICS TlO l,: When you think of it, the very use of the word "ethics" to describe efforts to keep congressional self-aggrandizement within reasonable bounds, or at least to give such self-aggrandizement the appearance of being kept within such bounds, is funny all by itself...

...The ethics committees apparently believe that the great ethical problem for members of Congress is how much earned income they get on the side and more specifically how much lecturing they do to get it...

...In this sense the life of faith is not just a commitment to the authority of Scripture passages and Church Councils but a commitment, over twenty centuries, to the integrity of fellow-believers, a confidence that, whatever has become of Jesus of Nazareth, the riving heart of his message has not been lost...

...But it would be worse than foolish to exploit these differences, to attempt to disguise the much larger measure of agreement that exists...

...If the presi15 April 1977:228 dency is a pulpit, should not senators also be preachers on occasion, teachers on others...

...needless to say, such interest as is produced is not returned to or credited to the taxpayer whose income derives from his labor...

...Information...

...It occurs to no one that it is just faintly possible for a senator to be quite as corrupted by the prospect of profits in oil or aircraft as he may be by that of a substantial fee for a commencement address...

...Inform...

...In this context it is important to see the NBC Anthony Burgess-Franco Zeflirelli over-six-hour Palm and Easter Sunday television film, lesus of Nazareth not uncritically as Jesus of Nazareth but as several other things as well: an extremely successful, cinematic, literary, artistic, commercial, highly orthodox, obsessively reverent, almost offensively inoffensive, media event...

...The point of any serious code of ethics for the Senate or for any legislative body would be to sever the cash nexus between the enactment and surveillance of the laws of the land, on the one hand, and the private profit of the legislators on the other...

...The taxes he thus pays through withholding are held either by the federal government or by the stiffs own employer for varying periods, during which periods the government or the employer has the money so withheld for operating capital or for interest-producing bank deposits...

...on the other hand, not infrequently it enables senators speculatively inclined to hobnob with fellow speculators whose ventures, open to participation by the hobnobbers, are often subject to the fructifying rays of legislation the hobnobbers may effect when back on the job...

...The speculator's taxes are not withheld on any regular basis and are not finally due until three and a half months after the end of the year...

...Least of all is a code of ethics something drawn up by a committee...

...Once a senator says in effect: I believe in the clear and present danger from Russian arms and as a result of my belief I am becoming a multi-millionaire while my state is wallowing in defense dollars, at that point, some sanity, even some ethical behavior, may grace the national legislature...

...The area in which lecturing fees can indeed be formally corrupting is that in which the fees are far above the reasonable expectation and are paid, overtly or covertly, by an individual firm or a trade association doing business with the government or seeking certain legislative goals...

...it is not something imposed, it is something observed because it is thought to be right...

...And is not the laborer worthy of his hire in these as in other lines of work...

...I at once acknowledge the gross unfairness of the comparison to all Talmudists, past, present and future...