INDIVISIBLE Lambertville NJ / New Hope PA

Category: Ethics

  • New Jersey Dark Money Veto Murky

    Contributed by Amara Willey.

    Citing loopholes and possible Constitutional challenges, Gov. Phil Murphy conditionally vetoed a campaign finance reform bill in May. Critics suggest that Murphy’s motivation is more political than altruistic.

    A conditional veto means that the governor objects to parts of a bill and proposes amendments that would make it acceptable.  It is now up to the legislature to decide if it will follow the governor’s recommendations and rewrite the bill or try to override the veto with a two-thirds vote. The danger is that the legislature may just let the bill, NJ-S1500, languish, thus killing the chance for substantial election reform. (more…)

  • The 28th Amendment: An American Promise

    Contributed by Deb Kline.

    Heather Santos from American Promise will lead the June 4 Springboard event on Dark MoneyJune 4 Springboard event on Dark Money. The organization is dedicated to achieving passage of the 28th Amendment to the Constitution, which affirms that We The People – not special interests, corporations or unions – govern the United States of America. The proposed bill has more than 100 sponsors. The 28th Amendment has been proposed to the House of Representatives (HJ Res. 2) and reads as follows: (more…)

  • In the Absence of Honor

    In the Absence of Honor

    What now, after the Mueller report?

    Contributed by Deb Kline.

    Honor is simply the morality of superior men – H.L. Mencken

    In the hours since the redacted Mueller Report has been made public, many – if not most – on the resistance side believe that the attempts to obstruct justice by the president are stunningly clear. We cannot believe Attorney General William Barr’s claim that there were none.

    Some of us had already moderated our hopes that we would finally get to the truth of what led to this horror show of an administration and subsequent actions to block its discovery. Nevertheless, whether we had already steeled ourselves or not, there was a strangely, familiar sense that we were suddenly thrust back to the day after the election in November 2016.

    Listening to the myriad analysts postulating in the media, to congressional legislators calling for the full report as well as in-person appearances by Barr and Mueller, it became known that while Trump certainly tried to block the investigation, in the end (oh, please don’t let this be the end) he was unwittingly successful because: a) – people around him knew he was ordering them to break the law and didn’t follow through; b) they lied or dissembled enough to make it impossible to uncover the truth, c) destroyed evidence.

    This alone is a profound perversion of the Oath of Office every president takes upon entering. Is this how one “preserves, protects and defends the Constitution of the United States”? The lie has been there since Day One.

    In March 2017, Benjamin Wittes and Quinta Jurecic wrote “What Happens When We Don’t Believe the President’s Oath?” in Lawfare:

    “It is that the presidential oath is actually the glue that holds together many of our system’s functional assumptions about the presidency and the institutional reactions to it among actors from judges to bureaucrats to the press. When large enough numbers of people within these systems doubt a president’s oath, those assumptions cease operating. They do so without anyone’s ever announcing, let alone ruling from the bench, that the President didn’t satisfy the Presidential Oath Clause and thus is not really president. They just stop working—or they work a lot less well.”

    We expect that those who occupy the highest offices in government will be people of honor. That whatever their failings, we expect that they have the good of the country and its people at heart. In Robert Mueller, we have a superior model of a man with honor, who follows the letter of the law to the extent that he declines to make a legal judgement on obstruction because people surrounding the president repeatedly lied or destroyed evidence.

    Up until a point, some of the those close to the president had a sense of honor and duty,  whether we agreed with them or not. However, most have left, only to be replaced by those who look at the government and ability to set policy as a means of enriching themselves.    

    Now, we see the decay happening before our eyes, and wonder, will we survive?

    Here’s my answer: Yes. One way or the other we will survive. We are still a democracy, we still have a voice and a vote. We have been through difficult times – many of us remember if not participated in the Civil Rights protests of the ‘60s, the anti-war protests and the Nixon-Watergate trial and resignation of the ‘70s. We survived 9/11. We will survive this president and our despair at what our government has become.

    Individually and collectively, we are compelled to survive. The work may get hard and ugly, but in this community there is strength. We hold each other, lean on each other, give each other courage. We honor you for all that you do, and demand that those who would govern, do so as well.

    Our country deserves no less.

  • H.R.1 – The Opening Act for the 2019 House of Representatives

    Contributed by Hui Chen.

    The first act of the newly Democrat-controlled House is to give power back to the people and bring ethics back into our government. H.R. 1 – the For the People Act – covers three main areas of reform:

    • Campaign Finance: requiring disclosure of information such as “dark money” and super PAC political donors, of political spending by those who do business with the federal government, of sources for political ads on Facebook and Twitter. It would also provide a matching-fund program for House candidates who agree to raise only small-dollar contributions.
    • Ethics: requiring disclosure of tax returns for candidates for president and vice president – and current holder of those offices; enhance oversight and enforcement power of the Office of Government Ethics; strengthen ethics in the legislative branch by prohibiting members of Congress from using taxpayer money to settle harassment and discrimination cases, and in the judicial branch by creating a new code of ethics for the United States Supreme Court.
    • Voting Rights: creating an automatic voter registration system to change voting from an opt in to an opt out process, promoting early voting, same-day, same-day voter registration, and online voter registration.  It would enhance election security against foreign interference, and end gerrymandering by moving the Congressional districting power from state legislature to independent commissions.


    How would these proposed measures help our democracy?
    Campaign finance reforms helps make our elected officials answer to us as much as they answer to big money. Running for office is a very expensive endeavor. Everything from signs to brochures to television ads and campaign events costs. It’s a reality that creates continuous pressure for those in office to feel beholden to their financiers. The disclosures proposed by H.R.1 would give us transparency to those relationships so that our officials know we would be watching them. The public matching fund for small donations will also shift more power to individual donors like us.

    Government ethics fights corruption and makes sure no one is above the law. Federal government workers, like all other professionals, must abide by strict ethics rules. These rules are there to ensure they conduct government business without the conflict of interest: that laws and regulations are enforced, and contracts and projects awarded, not for their personal benefits or pleasure, but in the interest of the public. The proposed measures under H.R.1 would apply at least some of these rules to elected officials, and to Supreme Court justices.
    Voting rights helps every voter be counted. Our entire democracy is premised on people’s ability to vote. Over the last election, we worked hard for every vote. The proposed measures under H.R. are to make sure every voter gets the best chance to exercise that vote, and that when those votes are counted, they are free from manipulation.


    Call to Action: What can you do to support H.R.1?
    H.R.1 is a large package, and pieces of it are now going into various House committees for deliberation. Find the topics that speaks to you and which committees will be addressing them. Learn the issues, talk to your network, and express your support on social media, in public, and to your representatives. Remember, the overall message of this bill is about democracy and ethics.

    Hui Chen is a member of ILNH and a former prosecutor and expert consultant with the US Department of Justice who publicly resigned due to concerns about ethics in the Trump Administration. As an expert in organizational ethics, she is a regular columnist in Bloomberg Law and commentator on MSNBC. Twitter @HuiChenEthics.