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Ethics watchdog says House ethics bill doesn't go far enough

According to the head of a Washington, DC-based organization that promotes ethics in public life, a recently passed ethics bill does not adequately address the problem of government corruption.

The bill (S. 1), which passed the House by a whopping 411-8 margin, requires legislators to disclose those lobbyists who gather $15,000 or more from different people within a six-month period of time. Lobbyists will also be barred from giving lawmakers gifts such as meals and tickets.

But Ken Boehm of the National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC) believes the bill should have eliminated "earmarks" altogether. He says it is joke to think that members of Congress do not benefit from these contributions.

"They don't benefit directly, [but] their business partner does -- and then their business partner can quietly make it up to them," says Boehm.

He contends earmarks have gotten out of hand, and that over the past ten years they have grown "like crazy" from what used to be a tiny percentage of the federal budget. Boehm calls for earmarks to be banned outright because they promote corruption.

Boehm adds that another provision of the ethics bill actually weakens ethics enforcement. "This [provision] actually lightens the penalty for when members of Congress lie on their financial closure reports. If this is a real ethics bill, it would have toughened the penalty," he says.

The NLPC spokesman calls S. 1 an attempt by Congress to try to fool the American people into thinking that it has done something serious about ethics, when in fact it is a very weak bill. The Senate hopes to vote on the final passage of the bill later this week.