If you saw the sleight-of-hand in the Senate last week over disclosure rules for earmarks, you could fairly conclude that the most important ethics reform for Congress is not the restrictions members place on each other but who is watching them long after this current wave of reform has passed. That requires an outside board to keep an eye on ethics and to hear public complaints, and it should be the standard by which successful reform is measured.

Majority Leader Harry Reid last week tried and failed to limit earmark disclosure to funds directed at nonfederal agencies – local construction projects, university research – but the largest amount of funding by far goes to federal entities, often military. Republican lawmakers properly pointed this out. But imagine trying to parse each phase of ethics reform similarly – travel restrictions, gift and meal bans, lobbying access and employment – and then maintain that level of oversight as the years pass but the incentives to skirt the law do not.

A robust, independent, nonpartisan ethics panel would not only enforce rules, but would be able to highlight where Congress had limited its authority and so help clean up rules that had been written to get around ethical limitations. Sens. Susan Collins and Joseph Lieberman proposed such a panel last spring – the Office of Public Integrity – but it was dropped when both Republicans and Democrats asserted they could effectively oversee their colleagues.

That was a major election ago, and now the idea of an independent panel has been brought back and many more members of Congress are interested in it. They should be – the issue has been studied at length, especially by the 1993 Joint Committee on the Organization of Congress, which, as Eliza Newlin Carney points out in National Journal, held 26 hearings with 243 witnesses on ethics enforcement.

It concluded that Congress needed “independent fact finders” because “the public believes that internal self-discipline presents inherent conflicts for members who have difficulty judging their peers.” The public believes this for good reason, as the sorry recent record of the House ethics committee demonstrates.

The Collins-Lieberman legislation would improve the credibility of Congress and end the self-policing that presents numerous opportunities for conflicts of interest. It would give the public access to accounts of behavior now hidden by the House and Senate committees. It would hold members to an objective standard.

For these reasons, the panel has not been a popular idea in Congress. But it cannot claim to have completed ethics reform unless independent overseers, with enough authority to enforce the rules, are included in the package.