Cheerful givers

In a rare outbreak of nagging conscience, the Senate Ethics Committee in 1995 adopted new rules prohibiting senators from accepting meals and gifts from special interests in excess of $50 in value. An exception was made for “widely attended events,” the understanding was that those events were meetings, parties, galas and fetes designed to bring the senator together with constituents.

It doesn’t take long for a loophole to get discovered and, from there, for abuse quickly to follow. What the viewing public saw of the recent Democratic and Republican national conventions was delegates getting showered with dropping balloons. What they did not see was senators getting showered with lavish parties and expensive gifts, courtesy of dozens of corporations and trade groups with business before Congress.

Sens. Paul Wellstone of Minnesota and Russell Feingold of Wisconsin saw it. The two Democrats criticized the shenanigans at their party’s convention in Los Angeles from an alternative gathering down the street. Now they are asking the Ethics Committee to close the loophole.

The “widely attended events” provision was intended to allow senators to meet with constituents at functions related to their official duties as lawmakers. Corporations are not constituents, corporate-sponsored bashes have nothing to do with official duties – unless someone is ready to make the argument that getting greased up by special interests is now an official duty.

Sens. Wellstone and Feingold are not especially optimistic about the chances the Ethics Committee will change the rules; already there are objections that senators can decide for themselves what they do with their free time, including what parties they attend and what party favors they bring home. It may, the two say, take a change in the underlying campaign-finance laws.

It sounds like the same old campaign-finance merry-go-round, but there is a difference. Members of Congress often brush off critics of these blatant attempts to buy legislation by saying what cheerful givers do with their money is their business and asserting they have no control over the actions of political action committees. Here, all senators have to do is decline the invitations. With no regrets.