My colleague Brian Svoboda, an expert in congressional ethics, has written an insightful commentary on how we might think about the ends and design of effective congressional ethics regulation. This is a complex and important question to which altogether too little attention has been devoted. Brian's extensive experience with these issues in private practice, coupled with his grasp on the broad policy and constitutional issues, enable him to effectively frame the issues for the discussion--and reforms-that are needed. He also tweets periodically on these issues at https://twitter.com/BrianSvoboda.

Brian's commentary follows:

From an Essay on Impeachment, a Useful Perspective on Congressional Ethics

Greg Weiner cogently argues in The New York Times that we should view the impeachment process institutionally in light of its constitutional design. (Full disclosure: while I used to work with Weiner in the Senate, my views are meant neither to be his nor anyone else’s.) Weiner says that impeachment’s purpose is not retributive, but prophylactic and forward-looking. The process is meant to “protect the public against future acts of recklessness and abuse.” Impeachment serves as a safety valve in the overall constitutional machinery to keep the system functioning properly.

While the processes and standards are markedly different, Weiner’s argument is highly relevant to Congressional ethics enforcement also. Since the House last reformed the ethics process in 2008, creating the Office of Congressional Ethics as an independent investigative authority, there has been a conspicuous lack of reflection over what the purposes of ethics enforcement really are, and how those purposes are best served. Weiner’s institutional approach offers one good perspective for this sort of reflection.

The Wallace Global Fund fired Morgan Lewis for advising Donald Trump on the mechanisms for controlling conflict of interest. It scorned the firm’s legal analysis and its dismissal of counsel was meant to keep the Fund from being “complicit” in the President’s disregard of legal and ethical norms. The Fund has concluded that the president’s actions are, on the ethical merits, clearly indefensible--case closed. So the Fund deems the lawyers culpable for putting their names and reputations behind what it has concluded is beyond the pale.

There is a different way of looking at what may exceptional about the Trump ethics regime, and it does not require agreement on specific violations of ethical obligations, or arguments about the viability of specific legal theories, or the questioning of the professional standards followed by law firms or lawyers. It is more concerned with a change, for the worse, in the institutional safeguards for keeping government service under public ethical controls. The problem could be thought of as a sort of privatization of public ethics.

This privatizing element has been introduced through certain features of the Trump business interests, and even more, the issues presented by the family members that the President would like to have by his side. Some special arrangement is generally thought necessary to allow the president to have the counsel and company of his daughter and son in-law. They will take unpaid positions within the White House, but in form, as recently announced, they will be treated as employees subject to conflict of interest rules that apply to all others.

Both Mr. Kushner and Ms. Trump have complex continuing interests in their businesses, and they argue that there is no fair or practical way to dispose of many of them. They will maintain and retain enough connection to their business to monitor, with the advice of counsel, potential problems that may arise. A similar mechanism was established by the president to administer his “trust,” run by his sons, and advised by a special ethics counsel selected from private practice. His trust also has added a compliance adviser, a long time lawyer and official in the Trump business.

All of this occurs “in the family,” and this is largely how it is reported. But it does not have to end there in future administrations. Another president may feel free to appoint “volunteer” senior White House advisers without family ties but with similarly far-flung and complex business interests. Paid their dollar a year, they would maintain much of their financial interests, perhaps excluding the simplest conflicts presented by easily disposable stock holdings. They would also set up with their lawyers a private arrangement for the management of any conflicts.

Congress, the Office of Government Ethics, and the White House have been lobbing views back and forth on whether the White House is subject to executive branch-wide ethics standards. It all started with the White House Counsel’s response to Kellyanne Conway’s exhortation to the public to” go buy” Ivanka Trump-branded line of products.

This Administration’s complex--and in the perspective of critics, troubling--position on core ethics issues would seem to make it especially important for the resolution of a case like Conway’s to go smoothly. The President has to show that he can successfully deal with the conflicts presented by his and his family's business interests. He faces deep doubts about the structure set up for this purpose, which includes control of his interests put in the hands of his own children, one of whom recently declared that the Trump brand is “the hottest it has ever been.” Then there is the ambiguous if not dubious trail of statements from the Administration about how Mr. Trump understands ethical constraints. Early on, the President said he had been advised that he was free of any limits under federal conflict of interest regulation, while his Chief of State averred that every step would be taken to avoid any “undue influence” of business interests over the Administration’s policies and actions. And the President has not kept his executive duties apart from his commercial interests, just this last weekend holding meetings at the Trump National Golf Club in Virginia.

So all who are involved in settling or overseeing the conclusion to the Conway episode-- the White House, OGE and the Congress--have had special obligations to be clear about the issue and the reasons for the disposition. The public would then learn something about the ethics Standards and rules, about how the Administration will approach their interpretation and enforcement, and about whether there are holes to be filled or procedures to be tightened.

So how has it gone? Not especially well, except for the response from one senior Member of Congress, Elijah Cummings, who has raised the key questions that now have to be answered.

The Senate’s invocation of Rule 19 against Senator Warren could not have been more curiously timed. Supposedly concerned to uphold senatorial debate standards, to keep out the nasty stuff, Senate Republicans disqualified Warren from further debate on the Sessions nomination because she read from Coretta Scott King’s 1986 statement opposing Mr. Sessions’ elevation to the bench. Meanwhile, the President routinely tweets out abuse of political adversaries, in the courts or (as in the case of John McCain) in the Congress.

Of course, the President is not bound by the Congressional rules and traditions. But that is the interesting question: if there are standards to be applied to democratic debate, especially to the remarks of senior elected officials, why should those standards be limited to legislative speech? And, if extended to executive branch speech, how?

It might be thought that standards of this kind are significant only in the management of a deliberative body: their function could simply be to avert fist fights on “the floor,” where debate takes place, or, short of violence, to keep order. There is more to them than just this functional administrative purpose. When the Senate censured Joe McCarthy in 1954, the politics were complex, but the Resolution noted his verbal abuse of adversaries. It cited his accusations that the Senate was convening a “lynch-party” against him, that a senior Member directing the Select Committee censure inquiry was “cowardly,” and that the Committee was acting as “attorneys-in-fact” for the Communist Party. The Senate applied the severe penalty of censure in part because McCarthy’s vicious speech violated “senatorial ethics” and "tended to bring the Senate into dishonor and disrepute."

This goal of protecting against institutional disrepute has been reflected for years in the ethics codes of both the House and the Senate.  See, e.g. S. Res. 338, 88th Cong., 2d. Sess. (1964]; House Rule XXIII Cl. 1 (“A Member, Delegate, Resident Commissioner, officer, or employee of the House shall behave at all times in a manner that shall reflect creditably on the House.”) Members engaged in abusive and irresponsible speech are not only disregarding some housekeeping regulation, like a prohibition against bringing their dinners into the chambers: They are presumptively acting in violation of their personal ethical obligations. There is no reason why reckless, vituperative speech by executive branch officials would not bring dishonor and discredit to that branch of the Government.

The Attorney General is often said to be the Cabinet officer whose responsibilities require a special degree of independence from presidential control. This is not new ground. Even President Washington envisioned the chief legal officer of the executive branch as a "skilled neutral expositor of the law.” Frederick A.O Schwarz and Aziz Z. Huq, Unchecked and Unbalanced: Presidential Power in a Time of Terror 191 (2007). In more recent times, partly as a result of Bobby Kennedy’s service as Attorney General in his brother’s Administration, and then of the troubles that followed from Richard Nixon’s choice for that post of his law partner and campaign chair John Mitchell, the pressure on the AG to establish an acceptable level of independence within an Administration has intensified.

There remain practical and theoretical limits to that neutrality. The AG is answerable to the President and is required like other Cabinet officers to pay attention to presidential policy priorities. There are, however, careful judgments to be made: norms that survive in one form or another, from Administration to Administration, that help keep the federal law enforcement apparatus from being wholly annexed to the political purposes of the West Wing.

Whether these norms have been properly tended to and enforced is never going to be the subject of agreement. Each party out of power has reasons--and some times defensible reasons-- to question an Administration’s adherence to norms. This is healthy: it is one way that norms survive, because with whatever degree of sincerity, and whether on the offensive or in self-defense, everyone claims that they care about them. Norms depend vitally on the simple and repeated declaration that they exist and will be upheld. So it helps to reinforce, and enforce, the norms when Democrats complain about the deficient independence of a Republican AG, and Republicans take up the charge at the time of a Democratic Administration, and each stoutly stands behind the necessity of an appropriate measure of DOJ independence.

This all requires alertness to anything that could be new in an Administration’s articulation of the role of its AG. And what White House senior adviser Steve Bannon has had to say about the role of Senator Jeff Sessions appears to be new.