Ethics in Washington

The Post-Employment Restrictions Act, the ethics measure that President Reagan pocket-vetoed last week, may have been almost as flawed as he contended. Approved hastily in the final hours of the 100th Congress, the bill’s limits on the lobbying that government officials can do after leaving office were in fact sloppy and overly broad. Prominent members of the President’s Cabinet worried that these restrictions would scare talented people away from government service. The American Civil Liberties Union, which is rarely found on the Administration’s side in any controversy, fretted that the law might violate the First Amendment.

There was a fair amount of hypocrisy in such objections--and a fair amount of relief, even on Capitol Hill, when Reagan interred the bill; this would have been the first ethics law that applied to ex-congressmen as well as to former officials of the executive branch. For every critic genuinely worried that the law was so vague that it would not stand up in court, there were many others who knew very well what the law meant and didn’t like it one bit. What this law said--perhaps not as artfully as it should have--is that former government officials have no automatic right to cash in on their experience by lobbying their old colleagues.

That concept, already enshrined in the 1978 Ethics in Government Act, deeply offends office-holders--Republicans and Democrats alike--who regard public service as a steppingstone to something better. After a stint on the public payroll at a stingy salary, such people assume that they’re due lucrative jobs in the private sector, working the same old corridors as lobbyists or public-relations executives or corporate chieftains.

The bill that Reagan vetoed tried to halt such abuses by closing some loopholes in the 1978 act. One provision, nicknamed “Never Again, Deaver,” revised the section in the old act that allowed Michael K. Deaver, Reagan’s former deputy chief of staff, to lobby White House officials in offices separate from the one in which he had worked. Deaver was convicted not of illegal lobbying but of lying about his activities before a congressional subcommittee and a federal grand jury. The vetoed bill would have prohibited various White House offices from being treated as separate entities.

Similarly, the bill would have extended some restrictions of the 1978 act. The 73 most senior officials of the government would have been barred from returning as paid lobbyists for a year, not just to their previous agencies but anywhere in the executive branch. And the bill would have broadened the lifetime ban on an ex-official’s lobbying on any matter in which he was “personally and substantially” involved while in government service; the new language, to which the White House and the ACLU objected, would have redefined lobbying to include “aiding and advising.” Some critics worried that, under that language, even a former President might have hesitated about picking up the telephone and calling his successor.

Whatever its flaws, the bill embodied two principles that should be incorporated into the ethics bills that both President-elect George Bush and Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.) have promised to press in the new Congress. The first is that no one has a right, constitutional or not, to make public policy one day and to make pots of money the next by lobbying one’s former colleagues; if talented people turn down Cabinet jobs because of such restrictions, the country may be better off without their services. The other guiding principle should be that Congress must be bound by the same rules that govern the executive branch.

Although the Democrats tried during the presidential campaign to capitalize on the Administration’s ethical abuses, the so-called “sleaze factor,” the public seems as skeptical about congressional morality as about what goes on in the executive branch. The landmark restriction that Congress included in the ethics act, forbidding lobbying by former congressmen and top congressional staff members for a year, addressed such skepticism but was, as the President complained, discriminatory; it let Congress off too lightly. To prove that the vetoed bill was not just an election-year stunt, Congress should come back in January and enact a tough ethics bill that treats all government officials alike. The hefty honorariums that legislators use to supplement their incomes but deny the executive branch should be outlawed. And former lawmakers should be subject to the same lobbying rules that govern the President’s men.