Returning ‘Good’ Money After Bad Misses Point on Ethics

Not to be excessively contrarian, but why exactly are members of Congress rushing to return campaign contributions from the clients of disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff?

It’s easy to see why many recipients of the $204,253 Abramoff has personally donated since 1999, all to Republicans, are sending back the money after the lobbyist pleaded guilty last week to multiple felony counts. No one likes their name in a ledger with an admitted crook.

But the rationale is less apparent for returning contributions from Abramoff clients, primarily Indian tribes, who haven’t been accused of breaking any laws and are mostly, if somewhat excessively, portrayed as victims in the scandal.

Sending back the tribes’ money isn’t only silly, it’s destructive to the cause of reforming Washington. It perpetuates the fiction that “bad” contributions can be segregated from “good” contributions in some orderly fashion that allows politicians to raise millions without compromising their independence.

It’s important to understand what was unique, and what more conventional, about Abramoff’s activities. The unique aspect of his operation -- the portion central to his criminal plea -- was his exorbitant charges to his clients and the kickbacks he took from their payments to his partner, Michael P.S. Scanlon. But the way he advised his clients to advance their political causes differed more in degree than kind from the capital’s business as usual.

According to testimony before the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, Indian tribes came to Abramoff with a variety of interests, mostly revolving around gambling. In the mid-1990s, the Mississippi Choctaws hired him to kill federal legislation taxing Indian casinos. The Louisiana Coushattas hired him to block potential competitors, both by encouraging Texas officials to bar Indian gambling in that state and by pressuring the U.S. Interior Department to refuse authorization for casinos from rival tribes. The Tiguas hired him to pass federal legislation specifically reopening their El Paso casino -- after the campaign Abramoff ran in Texas for the Coushatta tribe supported its closure.

These Indian tribes were not innocents. Most of the money they paid Abramoff apparently went to block potential competition from rival casinos. The Tiguas turned to Washington to evade Texas’ clear desire to bar Indian casino gambling inside its borders.

And yet, in the manner they pursued these goals, the tribes weren’t much different from anyone else operating in Washington. As a parade of tribal officials told the Indian Affairs Committee, they contributed money not only to dozens of legislators, but also to an assortment of conservative groups -- such as Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform and the Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy -- because Abramoff told them the donations would win them friends in high places.

“Sometimes [Abramoff] did say that we need to make these contributions” in order to advance causes, one tribal official told the Senate committee last summer. “Other times, [Abramoff said] it was just a good organization, and [donating] will make somebody else happy.”

Every day, in offices all around Washington, lobbyists provide exactly that advice to clients representing virtually every economic and social interest imaginable. As Abramoff told the New Republic magazine last year: “I didn’t create the system. This is the system we have.”

That’s too self-serving: The ongoing investigation will determine whether legislators crossed the line of bribery by undertaking specific actions as a quid pro quo for contributions or other favors from Abramoff. (In one of his pleas, he essentially admitted attempting to bribe one House member, who has been identified as Republican Rep. Bob Ney of Ohio.) But the vast majority of contributions legislators in both parties received from Abramoff’s Indian clients looks no different, legally or even morally, than the money they collect from all other interests jostling on Capitol Hill.

That’s why the rush to refund the money is so misguided. By returning the Indian money, the recipients are trying to claim vigilance against suspect contributions.

But political money doesn’t sort itself into black and white categories of appropriate and inappropriate; much of it, like the money from the tribes, is gray. It usually comes not with explicit demands but with implied expectations that every legislator must weigh. Is the Indian money really more suspect than the massive pharmaceutical contributions that influenced a prescription drug law that barred Medicare from bargaining for lower drug prices? In practice, the choices are not as clear-cut as legislators imply by returning the Indian dollars while keeping so many other donations that could provoke similar ethics questions.

The problems of special-interest influence in Washington can’t be resolved through selective spasms of morality when a scandal erupts. Nor are tougher restrictions on lobbying or campaign contributions likely to eliminate abuses. Money flows toward power like a river to the ocean; no dam can be built high enough to permanently separate them. A century of often valuable, but inevitably porous, political reform makes that clear.

Because so many of the ethics choices in Washington are gray, they most often raise questions not about politicians’ honesty, but about their judgment in balancing contributors’ priorities against the public interest. And the key to promoting good judgment isn’t new lobbying rules, or even criminal indictments, but electoral consequences for bad judgment.

Ultimately, the responsibility for policing Washington belongs not to prosecutors but to voters. The surest way for Americans to discourage elected officials from providing undue favors to special interests is to vote out some of those who do. The verdict that could transform Washington most won’t come from a jury box -- but from voters at the ballot box.

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Ronald Brownstein’s column appears every Sunday. See current and past Brownstein columns on The Times’ website at latimes.com/brownstein.