Obama and Ethics Legislations
ArchPundit
One of the interesting aspects of the campaign is that people keep claiming that Obama doesn’t have a record, but even in Illinois he worked on several decent proposals for tougher ethics in state government–one which many wish would have happened is public financing of judicial elections which he got through the Senate with Republican cosponsors only to be killed in–the Illinois House. Dan Vock did a really good run down on Obama in general and ethics in particular in last months Illinois Issues.
“Any time a politician at the federal level is willing to take a leadership role [on ethics], they undoubtedly open themselves up to charges of hypocrisy,” says Meredith McGehee, policy director of the Campaign Legal Center, a Washington, D.C.-based group that promotes stringent campaign finance and ethics laws.
In fact, she notes, McCain survived a brush with a savings-and-loan scandal in the late 1980s. But the scare convinced McCain of the need for ethics reforms, a cause that’s raised his profile across the country.
Like McCain, Obama has made ethics reform a central part of his political career. Two years into his first term in the U.S. Senate, he has had limited opportunities to leave a mark at the federal level, especially as a member of the minority party. But he has worked with Republicans on new good-government laws. He co-sponsored one, signed in September, that will create a federal spending database so Web users can track all grants, loans and awards greater than $25,000. He also pushed to limit the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s authority to award open-ended, no-bid contracts in the wake of major disasters — a reaction to post-Katrina abuses.
More to the point, last year Senate Democrats tapped Obama as the chief negotiator for their caucus in talks over post-Abramoff ethics reforms, though those negotiations faltered.
Ethics reform was one of Obama’s signature issues in Springfield, as well. Beyond the Gift Ban Act, he helped push Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s 2003 ethics reforms. The gift ban law, the first broad ethics reform in Illinois since the Watergate era, prohibited politicians from using campaign funds for personal use, barred fundraising on state property, established ethics commissions, curtailed fundraisers in Springfield during legislative sessions and mandated online reporting of campaign finances. The 2003 ethics package created independent inspectors general with subpoena powers to look into abuses by legislators, statewide officeholders and their employees. It further clamped down on the types of gifts lawmakers can receive and prohibited lobbyists and their spouses from sitting on state boards and commissions.
Obama also touted publicly financed judicial campaigns, an idea that was approved by the Illinois Senate but languished in the House.