Green groups are attacking staffers merely for working in Trump’s government.
But in today’s anti- Trump “resistance,” that counts for nothing. The left lost the election, lost the argument, and is losing President Obama’s precious legacy. Its response is a scorched-earth campaign against not only EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, but anyone who works for him.
.. The suit is simply Mr. Becerra’s excuse to delegitimize Mr. Pruitt... High-ranking appointees have always been demonized, but what makes this environmentalist campaign different is its purposeful extension of intimidation tactics to anyone willing to serve in the Trump administration... Political staffers have been put on notice that they may be watched, smeared and harassed, putting future job prospects at risk... Clearly aware of how obnoxious this is, ThinkProgress justifies the tracking by lamely noting that “these staffers are tasked with making decisions.. It essentially accused her, with no evidence, of doing the dirty work of energy donors in her past job at the Republican Attorneys General Association.. When green activists are poached from the NRDC or Sierra Club to work for Democratic administrations, they are praised for having experience. But when lawyers with a knowledge of regulated industries are hired to the EPA in a Republican administration, they are assumed to be unethical.
Walter Shaub: How to Restore Government Ethics in the Trump Era
Shortly after his inauguration, President George H. W. Bush counseled freshly minted White House appointees that, “It’s not really very complicated. It’s a question of knowing right from wrong, avoiding conflicts of interest, bending over backwards to see that there’s not even a perception of conflict of interest.
.. By holding themselves to the same exacting standards as the rest of the executive branch, they sent a clear message to those serving under them.
.. This tradition came to an abrupt stop with President Trump. By continuing to hold onto his businesses and effectively advertising them through frequent visits to his properties, our leader creates the appearance of profiting from the presidency. As things stand, we can’t know whether policy aims or personal financial interests motivate his decisions as president. Whatever his intentions may be, the resulting uncertainty casts a pall of doubt over governmental decision-making.
.. Every past administration actively supported O.G.E.’s work and respected it for taking stands when necessary. That White House support provided the office with the leverage it needed to fulfill its mission.
.. The Office of Government Ethics has been performing the same service it has always provided with respect to the current administration’s nominees. In fact, I have succeeded in moving President Trump’s nominees on average almost a week (six days to be exact) faster than I moved President Obama’s nominees during the last presidential transition, without compromising O.G.E.’s high standards. I am particularly proud of this accomplishment because this administration’s nominees generally hold far more complex financial interests than the last administration’s nominees, a circumstance that would normally be expected to slow O.G.E.’s work.
.. The press secretary touts one of the president’s commercial enterprises as the “winter White House,” and the State Department has publicized it around the globe.
A White House lawyer made the extraordinary assertion that “many regulations promulgated by the Office of Government Ethics (‘OGE’) do not apply to employees of the Executive Office of the President.”
Appearing to echo this view, the Office of Management and Budget challenged O.G.E.’s authority to collect routine ethics records.
Even some presidential nominees have pushed back against ethics processes with uncommon intensity.
.. the very official charged with responsibility for White House ethics, the counsel to the president. His office recently ginned up ten unsigned, undated waivers, many of which seem intended to have retroactive effect, raising the specter of a possible effort to paper over ethics violations. Worse, the counsel appears to be both issuer and recipient of two waivers.
.. Defenders of the status quo also seem unwilling to acknowledge the existence of a problem absent clear evidence of significant violations. This argument risks legitimizing an approach of bare minimum legal compliance. The existence or absence of identified violations is not the only measure of an ethics program — no program can detect every violation and those detected are often hard to prove.
.. Those systems depend on adherence to ethical norms.
.. Recent experiences have convinced me that the existing mechanism is insufficient. The Office of Government Ethics needs greater authority to obtain information from the executive branch, including the White House. The White House and agencies lacking inspectors general need investigative oversight, which should be coordinated with O.G.E.
.. Because we can no longer rely on presidents to comply voluntarily with ethical norms, we need new laws to address their conflicts of interest, their receipt of compensation for the use of their names while in office, nepotism and the release of tax forms.
.. Disclosure requirements can be refined and the revolving door tightened.
Of money and morals
Moneylending has been taboo for most of human history. So how did usury stop being a sin and become respectable finance?
In 2014, Citigroup called. The bank had been battered by successive scandals and a wave of public mistrust after the financial crisis, so they wanted to hire Miller as an on-call ethicist. He agreed. Rather than admonish bankers to follow the law – an approach that Miller thinks is inadequate – he talks to them about philosophy. Surprisingly, he hasn’t found bankers and business leaders to be a tough crowd. Many confess a desire to do good.
.. And then we spend next hour talking about ethics, purpose, meaning. So I know there’s interest.’
.. Miller wants people in finance to talk about ‘wisdom, whatever its source’. To ignore these traditions and thinkers, as the bulk of the industry tends to do, is equivalent to ‘putting on intellectual blinders’, he says.
.. Lending money has long been regarded as a moral matter. So just when and how did most bankers stop seeing their work in moral terms?
Moral Vacuum in the House of Trump
He cared deeply about appearances. “Freddy was always very neat, a Beau Brummell,” Sam LeFrak told Weiss. “He had a mustache, and that mustache was always right, perfect.” He was also remorseless. In an interview with Michael D’Antonio, Donald Trump described his father as “very tough” and “very difficult” and someone who “would never let anything go.”
.. Frederick used various accounting measures to collect an extra $15 million in rent (in today’s dollars) from a government housing program, on top of paying himself a large “architect’s fee.” He was hauled before investigating committees on at least two occasions, apparently was arrested at a K.K.K. rally in Queens (though it’s not clear he was a member), got involved in a slush fund scandal with Robert Wagner and faced discrimination allegations.
.. I don’t think moral obliviousness is built in a day. It takes generations to hammer ethical considerations out of a person’s mind and to replace them entirely with the ruthless logic of winning and losing; to take the normal human yearning to be good and replace it with a single-minded desire for material conquest; to take the normal human instinct for kindness and replace it with a law-of-the-jungle mentality.
.. You’d think there would be some sense of embarrassment at having been caught lying so blatantly.
But in his interview with Sean Hannity he appeared incapable of even entertaining any moral consideration. “That’s what we do in business,” the younger Trump said. “If there’s information out there, you want it.”
.. Don Jr. doesn’t seem to possess the internal qualities necessary to consider the possibility that he could have done anything wrong.
That to me is the central takeaway of this week’s revelations. It’s not that the Russia scandal may bring down the administration. It’s that over the past few generations the Trump family has built an enveloping culture that is beyond good and evil.
.. The Trumps have an ethic of loyalty to one another.
.. But beyond that there is no attachment to any external moral truth or ethical code. There is just naked capitalism.
.. Their scandals may not build to anything impeachable, but the scandals will never end.