The Political Ethics of Public Service

Vera Vogelsang-Coombs

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137494009
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book provides a defense of democratic politics in American public service and offers the political ethics of public service as a realistic and optimistic alternative to the cynical American view toward politics and public service. The author's alternative helps career public servants regain public trust by exercising constitutionally centered moral and political leadership that balances the regime values of liberty and equality in governing American society while contributing to the ethical progress of the nation. She identifies three distinct leadership styles of political ethics, enabling career public servants to reconcile their personal loyalties, morality, and consciences with the public and private morality of American society and their constitutional obligations to secure the democratic freedoms of Americans. Recognizing career public servants' moral and institutional struggles, the book proposes a rigorous leadership development program to acclimate individuals to workplace psychological, moral, and political challenges. The view offered here is that career public servants must be a part of, rather than isolated from, American politics to be effective on the job.

Part I
Introduction

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

Vera Vogelsang-CoombsThe Political Ethics of Public Service10.1057/978-1-137-49400-9_1

Begin Abstract

1. Case Study of Cuyahoga County, Ohio: The American Way of Ethics

Vera Vogelsang-Coombs¹

(1)

Cleveland State University, Beachwood, Ohio, USA

[According to Friedrich Nietzsche,] morality is neither absolute nor rational nor natural… the world has known many moral systems, each of which advances claims of universality; all moral systems are therefore particular, serving a specific purpose for their propagators or creators, and enforcing a certain regime that disciplines human beings for social life by narrowing our perspectives and limiting our horizons.

Robert C. Holub, Introduction to Beyond Good and Evil

Copyright © 2008 by Oxford University Press

I, for instance, want to live, in order to satisfy all my capacities for life, and not simply my capacity for reasoning, that is, not simply one-twentieth of my capacity for life … yet it is life, and it is not simply extracting of square roots.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground

End Abstract

On November 3, 2009, the voters of Cuyahoga County, the most populous and urbanized county in Ohio, adopted a home-rule charter to modernize government. This reform replaced the commission form of county government established in 1810. The Cuyahoga County charter government authorized an eleven-member, district-based, county council and an elected county executive, and all but one of the eight independently elected constitutional (row) officers under the older commission form were eliminated. This 2009 reorganization created a county structure that resembled the familiar strong mayor-council form of municipal government even though counties do not have municipal authority under Ohio law. Shortly after becoming operational on January 1, 2011, the new county council, as mandated by the charter, enacted a strict ethics ordinance. This ordinance blended Ohio’s ethics laws with the recommendations put forth by more than one thousand citizen-volunteers who participated in thirteen advisory workgroups during the governmental transition.

The voters’ decision to reform Cuyahoga County’s government was a response to the special circumstances spawned by a massive public corruption investigation of county elected officials. Specifically, on July 28, 2008, more than two hundred agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Internal Revenue Service executed warrants to search the homes and offices of two county commissioners, the elected county sheriff, the elected county auditor, the elected sanitary engineer, two county judges and their aides, and several top administrative officials. In addition, the federal agents raided the offices of prominent business executives for evidence of bribes given to county officials in exchange for securing lucrative contracts. The federal government’s investigations—the biggest in the history of the FBI—resulted in the prosecution and conviction of more than fifty public officials.¹

Specifically, the first county elected official to resign and be convicted was the Cuyahoga County sheriff. The sheriff, a former pipe fitter, who held office for more than 30 years, pled guilty for theft in office and for ordering his employees to sell tickets to his political fund-raisers while they were on duty at the County’s Justice Center. He also broke Ohio’s ethics law by hiring his son as a special deputy. Given the sheriff’s advanced age and serious illnesses, he received a fine and a sentence of 1 year of house arrest, along with the order to pay restitution of $130,000. A decision of the Ohio Elections Commission caused additional public outrage because it permitted the sheriff to use leftover campaign funds that he illegally raised to pay the restitution.² In contrast, a federal jury found the Cuyahoga County Commission president, who was also the chair of the county Democratic Party, guilty of thirty-one bribery and racketeering charges, and he received a sentence of 28 years in federal prison. The county auditor was convicted on twenty-two corruption charges, and was sentenced to nearly 22 years in federal prison. The auditor’s lighter sentence reflected a plea bargain that included his agreement to testify against others, including the commission president, about patronage hiring, reduced property assessments for cronies, the fixing of court cases, and the acceptance of bribes.

During the monumental public corruption investigations, the Plain Dealer, the metropolitan newspaper of Cuyahoga County, ran continuous stories about the scandals under the banner of the “County in Crisis.” Furthermore, the federal investigations motivated the local business chamber to organize a political movement aimed at modernizing the structure of Cuyahoga County’s government. The chamber’s leaders sponsored an intensive marketing campaign designed to shape public opinion against retaining the commission form of government, portrayed by The Plain Dealer’s frequent editorials as a breeding ground for corruption. Part of the logic behind the aggressive marketing campaign was to avoid the political inertia that stalled a previous attempt to reform the government of Cuyahoga County. In 1996, a charter commission produced a comprehensive reform proposal, but it received no political support and never appeared on the ballot. By 2009, the voters were ready to eliminate the influence peddling, nepotism, and favoritism associated with Cuyahoga’s scandals, as they overwhelmingly adopted the reform proposal for a charter government (66 % said “Yes” in the referendum). The extensive federal investigations and the intense media coverage of the “County in Crisis” created the political climate for change that the voters endorsed.³

Three months after taking office, the new county council adopted a comprehensive ethics ordinance that extended the scope of Ohio’s strict ethics laws to include all county elected officials and employees, as well as lobbyists and vendors, and mandated annual ethics training for all of them. In addition, this ordinance required vendors to participate in procurement training and established a whistleblowing policy that was stricter than that of the state. The county council also established an independent office, the Agency of Inspector General, responsible for rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse in county operations, and for enforcing the ethics ordinance.⁴

The American Way of Ethics: The Problem

The Cuyahoga County reorganization illustrates the problem associated with the American way of ethics. The American way of ethics entails an “ethics moment” in which external pressures for cleaning up corruption in government become overwhelming. An ethics moment functions as a “moment of madness” in which an unlikely political change suddenly becomes possible.⁵ Nevertheless, organizations (and individuals) “stumble into ethics.”⁶ If elected officials ignore an ethics moment, then the stability of their representative governments is in peril. The reason is that citizens feel betrayed and disaffected by the scandals. In fact, the incumbent Cuyahoga County commissioners attempted to ignore the ethics moment produced by the federal corruption investigations. To thwart political change, the incumbent commissioners (whose offices were eliminated under the reform proposal) placed directly onto the same ballot as the charter government referendum an alternative for establishing a charter commission to study whether to reorganize Cuyahoga County’s government. The commissioners also mobilized a political coalition of prominent local elected official supporters to campaign against the adoption of the charter government.

According to Donald Menzel, ethics moments in organizations with a shady history of ethical governance do not disappear suddenly.⁷ Thus, it is no surprise to find that citizens felt betrayed once the publicity surrounding the federal investigations made them aware of the extensive wrongdoing in Cuyahoga County. According to two psychologists interviewed by the Plain Dealer, the Cuyahoga County crisis led to citizens’ feeling “ripped off by government” that, in turn, fostered “a sense of skepticism and distrust, a sense of anxiety and uneasiness about who is running the show, and an alienation from government.”⁸ Fueled by the barrage of media stories about the “County in Crisis,” this alienation prompted Cuyahoga’s ethics moment such that the voters in 2009 decisively rejected the commissioners’ charter commission alternative; 72 % said “No” in the referendum.⁹

In the American way of ethics, conspicuous ethics consumption follows an ethics moment. Conspicuous ethics consumption is designed to restore public confidence in a tainted government. As in Cuyahoga County, ethics consumption involves the adoption of ethics codes, policies, and procedures; the establishment of ethics officers and ethics enforcement agencies; the implementation of on-the-job ethics audits, training, and educational programs; and the installation of ethics (whistleblower) hotlines. Ethics consumption is experienced in American government in all branches and at all levels. In fact, forty-one American states have ethics enforcement commissions, of which some have more than one ethics enforcement agency; the remaining nine states chose to regulate the ethical conduct of public servants through constitutional officers, such as the state attorney general or the secretary of state.¹⁰ At the federal level, the Office of Government Ethics works with more than 5,000 ethics officers in 132 executive branch agencies; together they oversee approximately three million civilian officials and employees.¹¹ In addition, there are seventy-two statutorily based inspectors general throughout the federal government, who conduct audits and investigations to combat “waste, fraud, and abuse.”¹² Furthermore, the US Congress has ethics offices in both chambers: the Office of Congressional Ethics, which is a non-partisan independent body covering the 435 elected members of the US House of Representatives, and the Select Committee on Ethics, which covers the 100 elected members of the US Senate. The US Judicial Conference upholds the codes of conduct for US judges and judicial employees,¹³ while each of the fifty states has its own commissions on judicial conduct.¹⁴

Furthermore, in the American way of ethics, ethics moments and conspicuous ethics consumption are not limited to the public sector. For instance, an ethics moment in non profit management emerged from the abuses of tax-exempt status, excessive executive compensation, and inappr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Ethical Inquiry of Career Public Servants: Balancing Public and Private Morality in Governing Methods
• 3. Great Political Ideas and American Constitutionalism: Balancing Liberty and Equality in Government
• 4. Political Institutions and Democratic Public Service: Balancing Liberty and Authority in Bureaucratic Governance
• 5. Conclusion
• Backmatter