SUMMARY
Making ethics an ethics issue and holding corrupt conservative legislators accountable.
The legislative battle over lobbying reform has allowed conservatives to shift the blame for the mess in Washington to lobbyists, create the illusion of a bipartisan scandal, and to avoid responsibility for their own ethical lapses. Of course lobbying reform is necessary, but let’s not kid ourselves — if you need a law to tell you that taking a first-class, lobbyist-paid luxury golf package to Scotland is morally wrong, you shouldn’t be writing laws in the first place. We strongly believe that you cannot fix an ethical problem with only a legislative solution. And we are certain that poison pill proposals from conservatives are designed to put progressives “on the wrong side” of lobbying reform. Further, these poison pills will doom any real chance of reform altogether. But, if this becomes a battle over legislative proposals and why reforms aren’t moving in Congress, the morally-corrupt, ethically-bankrupt conservatives will have won.
