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How To Evade the New Ethics BillAnd why it should become law anyway.

By Timothy Noah
Posted Tuesday, Aug. 7, 2007, at 7:45 PM ET

I was fully prepared to sneer at the new ethics bill passed by the House and Senate. Surely it would be full of loopholes you could drive a truck through. On close inspection, however, this bill would appear to be the real thing. The reforms it contains are significant and carefully thought out. If signed into law by President Bush (he'd be an utter fool to veto it), the legislation will make life more difficult for the people who enacted it. That's at least as true for Democrats as it is for Republicans. I honestly can't recall witnessing so sweeping a congressional house-cleaning during the three decades I've been a reporter.

That said, can the bill be gotten around? Of course it can! Let's take a look at three major provisions.

Shutting Down the K Street Project. After the Republicans took control of Congress in 1995, House Majority Leader Tom "the Hammer" DeLay and Grover Norquist, a Jack Abramoff intimate who is president of the nonprofit Americans for Tax Reform, initiated a form of corruption so crass that it had never even occurred to the Democrats. Every Tuesday morning, Sen. Rick Santorum, R.-Pa., would preside over a meeting in which lobbyists would pass around a list of available jobs in their firms. Santorum would inform these lobbyists which loyal Republicans the lobbyists ought to hire to fill these vacancies. He wasn't asking; he was telling. The idea was that if the lobbyists didn't hire the people that GOP leaders wanted them to hire, those GOP leaders would turn a deaf ear in their general direction.

The new ethics bill contains a provision that would make future meetings of this type illegal. That's commendable, because to whatever extent the Republicans managed to acquire control over the lobby industry the Democrats might logically choose to answer in kind. Instead, they are outlawing the whole endeavor. Under the bill, any senator or House member who "takes or withholds, or offers or threatens to take or withhold, an official act" or "influences, or offers or threatens to influence, the official act of another" based on "an employment decision or employment practice of any private entity" will be fined and possibly jailed for up to 15 years.

I'm not aware that any House Democrats have tried to bully lobby firms into hiring Democrats. If they have, under the ethics bill they would henceforth have to avoid any quid pro quos. But most members of Congress are already well-trained by the laws governing bribery to avoid being too explicit whenever they make promises or threats. Under the prohibition, senators and House members would remain free to enunciate vague promises or threats, or, even better, to have aides insinuate on their behalf. What's more, the ban applies only when the senator or House member seeks to influence a job hire "solely on the basis of partisan political affiliation." It won't be easy to prove in court that a favored job candidate was advanced only because he or she was a Democrat (or Republican), and not, for instance, because he or she was an extremely able person. On the plus side, though, the new prohibition so thoroughly demonizes K Street ward-heeling that members of Congress probably won't want to be caught doing it, even if the risk of successful prosecution is small.

Cracking Down on Spousal Lobbying. Until now, Congress has been reluctant to institute rules governing lobbying by congressional spouses. It's an awkward area, because the spouse surely deserves to live his or her own life, and if she—it's usually a "she"—was a lobbyist before she was a congressional spouse, as if often the case, one is in effect meddling with her livelihood. Nonetheless, a lobbyist who is also a congressional spouse acquires enhanced clout, and can't help becoming a more desirable employee to a lobby firm.

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Timothy Noah is a senior writer at Slate.
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