The Room Where It Happened

PETER: This is BackStory. I’m Peter Onuf. Campaign season is heating up, and with it concerns about the amount of corporate money flooding modern elections. Critics call it legalized corruption. But as Teddy Roosevelt learned more than a century ago, if you want a seat at the table, it can be hard to stay clean.

MALE SPEAKER: Here was the President of the United States caught with his hand in the corporate cookie jar.

PETER: Today on the show, we’re looking at charges and countercharges of political corruption. We’ll visit the nation’s early days, when fears about corrupt politicians took on a life of their own.

JOANNE FREEMAN: Ironically, the inability to find corruption ups the idea that it really must be there.

PETER: And we’ll consider the gray area that makes one man’s corruption another man’s good governance.

MALE SPEAKER: Why is there a bargain if my action happens to help you and your action happens to help me?

PETER: A history of political corruption. Don’t go away.

Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the University of Virginia, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.

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MALE SPEAKER: From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is BackStory with the American Backstory hosts.

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BRIAN: Welcome to the show. I’m Brian Balogh, and I’m here with Peter Onuf.

PETER: Hey, Brian.

BRIAN: And Ed Ayers is with us.

ED: Gentlemen.

BRIAN: We’re going to start the show off today with a guy who gets a lot of calls in his job.

ELLIOT BERKE: The calls really are of one or two varieties. One is, I am in trouble, the FBI knocked on my door, what do I do–

BRIAN: This is Elliot Berke, a lawyer in Washington DC. Among other things, Berke specializes in congressional ethics.

ELLIOT BERKE: –or hey, I’ve assumed some office or we’re taking on some new initiative, and we want to make sure we don’t have any problems moving forward.

ED: Berke basically helps elected officials and staffers figure out if what they’re doing or have done is corrupt. And whether or not you’re corrupt might seem like a pretty simple thing to figure out, but this is, after all, Washington, DC. A few years ago, a congressional staffer came to him with this predicament. Does she face any ethics issue in accepting an engagement ring?

ELLIOT BERKE: If your boyfriend or girlfriend wants to propose to you, and gives you a ring, technically speaking that needs to be pre-cleared by the ethics committees.

ED: Why? Because before any Congress member or staffer receives a gift worth more than $375, first it has to be cleared.

BRIAN: Unless, says Berke, the recipient can prove the gift is from a personal friend. And even that can get complicated in the social world of Washington, where the dating world often encompasses K Street and Capitol Hill.

ELLIOT BERKE: I had a conversation with one of the ethics councils in which I was told that it was actually better if you were living with your boyfriend or girlfriend, because then it shows a history of sort of sharing the rent and, you know, reciprocal gifts back and forth than if you were living apart.

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PETER: I love it.

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ED: Berke says that a lot of these convoluted rules are the product of various scandals that have rocked Capitol Hill over the years.

ELLIOT BERKE: Most of what we still see are knee jerk reactions to scandal that creates very arcane and, I think, impractical rules to address something that, had proper enforcement been in play, you know, the laws on the books and the rules on the books could have addressed the situation.

ED: A recent example, says Berke, is the reformed triggered by the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal a few years back.

BRIAN: Now, you will remember that Jack Abramoff was a lobbyist who admitted to lavishing Congress members with gifts in exchange for votes that benefited his clients. And soon after passing this particular set of reforms, the House Ethics Committee sent out a memo clarifying some of the new rules.

ELLIOT BERKE: In this memo, they said that a member may accept a $15 baseball cap with a corporate logo of a company, but they could not accept a $12 coffee mug from the same company with the same logo. I don’t know if a coffee mug has a greater utility than a baseball cap, but while we appreciate the clarity on that point, it still can be very frustrating to try to explain to somebody that, you know, that’s where they ended up.

BRIAN: Elliot, that’s such a partisan slam, baseball versus cappuccino. I mean, come on.

ELLIOT BERKE: Well, I enjoy both.

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ED: Now, Berke does believe that there should be strong ethics guidelines on the books, but he also thinks that the current Band-Aid system of reform means that he has to spend a whole lot of time parsing the difference between mugs and caps, while truly questionable deals don’t get noticed at all. Consider this example. Under current rules, a lobbyist is not allowed to take a lawmaker out to lunch unless the lunch is just a lunch.

ELLIOT BERKE: They can turn around and take that member of Congress as a candidate to lunch as a fundraiser and pass him a $500 check. That’s perfectly permissible. But I’m not sure, from a civic perspective, that that’s the most sensible environment to operate.

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