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An ‘Honor System’ for Those Without Honor
I realize most of you are not as interested in this topic as I may be, but this may still be of interest to you:
…49 members of Congress and at least 182 of the highest-paid Capitol Hill staffers were late in filing their stock trades during 2020 and 2021.
Lawmakers and senior congressional staffers who blow past the deadlines established by the 2012 Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act are supposed to pay a late fee of $200 the first time. Increasingly higher fines follow if they continue to be late — potentially costing tens of thousands of dollars in extreme cases.
But accountability and transparency are decidedly lacking.
Forty-nine seems a bit low…how many others filed incomplete forms or otherwise just flat out lied on them? (Same question for the staffers.) But surely I overestimate the lack of honor in our ruling beltway:
Congressional ethics staff wouldn’t confirm the existence of nonpublic ledgers tracking how many officials paid fines for violating the STOCK Act. And 19 lawmakers wouldn’t answer questions from Insider about whether they’d paid a penalty. Ten other lawmakers said they’d paid their fines, but they declined to provide proof, such as a receipt or canceled check.
Not very transparent there but surely Nancy’s House overflows with honor (aside from her dirty Tesla stock purchase earlier this year, of course. But I digress):
It also shows how Congress sets a lower standard for itself on financial conflict-of-interest matters than on other concerns. For instance, consider that the House routinely issues automatic fines when members violate COVID-19 mask mandates and makes the information public. But when it comes to a member’s personal finances, the House doesn’t do a particularly good job of policing itself on a law it helped write.
At least we can count on the Ethics Committees, right?:
No reports exist showing how often the Office of Congressional Ethics investigated financial-disclosure matters before the STOCK Act’s passage. But one former attorney who worked in the office said nothing changed after lawmakers passed the law.
“We were not looking into it. There was just nobody paying attention to it. No one was filing complaints,” said Kedric Payne, who was the former deputy chief counsel at the Office of Congressional Ethics around the time that the STOCK Act was passed. …
“When you have the ethics committee, who has failed to go after these blatant violations — it sends a message that anything goes,” Payne added.
Yes, it appears that anything goes among our entitled class in this government of the people, by the better people, and for the betterment of the pocketbooks of those better people.
Good day.
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For those who need to catch up on their reading, here are some handy links:
Published in GeneralOn Being a Country Class Schmuck: We Get What We Deserve
Behind the Scenes Fun of the Day: Complex Rivers of Cash
Just as taxes are for the little people, so are rules on insider trading…
And these people need to know where that 600 bucks in your bank account came from.
Thanks for sharing, but when communists are taking control of our government and society and we’re about to irretrievably lose our form of government this seems somewhat less important. It’s in a similar category as people complaining about Trump not controlling the budget better. Yes, it would be nice if these things didn’t happen but they are far from the most important.
None of them are bright enough to hide anything. And our Sergeant Shultz mainstream media can’t be relied on to notice it anyway.
Just another example of the foolishness of voting more power to the government. The corrupt and ruthless will always rise to the top, but progressives are convinced that human nature is “basically good.” You can’t make this shite up.
The Congress has always been corrupt and inept. it was designed to be slow and inefficient, and I assume the founders knew how things work so corruption was guaranteed. The executive branch is far more honest, or at least takes explicit bribes and payoffs far less frequently, but overwhelmingly more dangerous and it is they who are destroying the country. Congress’s worst error is allowing it to all happen. Being human we continually think we can make matters work better by simplifying them and imposing rules. Our system worked miraculously because we didn’t empower government at any level to manage important matters except where there was no other choice, i.e. defense, foreign policy and borders, which curiously are the three things our government doesn’t do with seriousness any more, and borders not at all.
Biden walks around that by the benefits going to family members. If it’s information, the politician doesn’t have to get the short-term benefit, their awareness means they can give that information to someone else, the benefits are held until they retire, and done.
We have Members. Unfortunately, we sometimes have the wrong Members.
This is really not that difficult. Every month I get a statement from my broker that has a detailed account of all the activity that took place that month. At the end of the year I could make copies of all the statements and send them in for inspection. The only reason I would hold back is if I had something to hide. Then I would drag my feet, knowing that the rules are never enforced on Congress, and perhaps never have to give up the information. This is corruption and, as such, is just another nail in the coffin of what was once a great country.
Yes, I think this lack of honor is the main thing that sickens Americans today. If Biden had apologized or shown one iota of remorse for the Afghanistan humiliation and the murder of our 13 soldiers, I don’t think people would be chanting FJB as much today.
Mark Judge, who was an unwilling target of the Kavanaugh attack, has some thoughts on honor too. https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/16/the-kavanaugh-war-and-the-end-of-honor-culture/
Thank you for that. I had read that and wanted to tie his theme of “honor culture” in to this but it just didn’t come together that way.
In one of my past lives I edited the Navy part of the Annual Report to Congress from the commission that was closing military bases and selling the land (Base Realignment and Closure, BRAC) on the environmental cleanup operations at Navy installations slated for closure. It was one of those reports where it was easy to believe that no one would ever read this stuff, unless they had a real good reason.
One of those sites was Treasure Island, which is prime real estate in San Francisco Bay. At the time there were two entities that wanted it as soon as the Navy turned loose: the city of San Francisco, for a new sports stadium, and a private developer, for condos. The city was winning until the developer pulled out a copy of our report that said the Navy was cleaning up trace radioactive elements from a dump where someone had thrown away a dental X-ray machine. The developer brought the city to a halt by waving our report and saying, “You can’t put a stadium here! The Navy says it’s radioactive!”
The developer is Nancy Pelosi’s husband. Wonder how he got a copy of that report.
So…did her husband get to build some radioactive condos?
I look at this as low grade corruption. It’s not worth regulating.
Or to put it another way, not everything that’s wrong should be against the law.
I guess as long as it’s not hidden, the voters can decide if they want corrupt politicians or not.
For me, it’s not about the money they make. It’s about the effects of the corruption along the way to them making that money. ‘Follow the money” is about finding malfeasance, not finding money.
Good point. It also reminds me that when Dr. Vincent Racaniello (who I consider a good guy) says we should continue to do gain of function research on viruses but regulate it, that this is what regulation looks like.
Maybe they should all be forced to sit in a room with their eyes taped open or something, and watch Andromeda Strain over and over, until they come to their senses.
Yet, both problems are the same. Corrupt officials are bought off by communists, which allows communism to prosper. And then communism always involves corrupt officials. If you can remove the corruption, you can remove the communism.
That’s a movie, isn’t it?
While listening to the soundtrack of “Hamilton.”
Yes, I first saw it when a guest for the evening in the wardroom on my dad’s ship. It’s not the greatest movie ever made, but respectable. It’s a Michael Crichton story. They remade it not too long ago. It’s selection for this supposedly dire fate is odd to me.
Because a lot of scientists don’t seem to have much serious respect for “risky” and “dangerous” and “deadly” etc.