I hate the Ethics Commission

AT THE END of a monthly meeting of the Los Angeles City Ethics Commission, I usually feel like singing the old Johnny Paycheck song, “Take This Job and Shove it.”

I tend to hate the Ethics Commission. Driving home from City Hall, I’m often so mad that I have to take care not to whack another car on the Santa Monica Freeway.

We’re the watchdogs for the city’s campaign-finance and ethics rules. We hand out fines. This conveys the impression that we have power, that we are a force in City Hall. We’re not. We operate on the margins. Big money dominates politics, and we can’t do much about it.

There are five ethics commissioners. We go to a meeting once a month, read material to prepare for it and occasionally speak to community groups. I’ve got two more years to go on my five-year term.

One of our jobs is to enforce campaign contribution laws. There are many violations, sometimes by mistake, sometimes by intention. Our ace investigators and auditors nail the violators. Last Tuesday, for example, we hit former City Councilman Martin Ludlow for $105,271 because he accepted $30,000 from a union when the limit is $500.

But the violations usually aren’t that big, and I find myself mostly feeling like a judge in traffic court.

I got a good lesson in my own ineffectiveness at a recent City Council Rules and Elections Committee hearing. I had high hopes for our proposal to ban lobbyists from raising campaign money.

Basically, the committee is the graveyard for our proposals, interred there so that the other council members will not have to vote on them. After all, if they support us, their fundraising would be hurt. If they vote against us, constituents and loudmouth council critics might get mad. For them, burial is definitely the best outcome.

I was especially in favor of the lobbyist proposal. I knew it would probably have as much effect on the political system as posting speed limit signs has on bad driving, but I thought it would at least limit the influence of lobbyists.

The questions from the rules committee, including Council President Eric Garcetti and Councilman Dennis Zine, did not seem very supportive. My confidence drained away. Then came the death blow. Renee Stadel, the deputy city attorney who advises the Ethics Commission, took a seat at the witness table. She informed Garcetti and Zine that the state Supreme Court had already ruled that lobbyists could not be prevented from asking their clients for contributions.

Clients make up the bulk of a lobbyist’s contribution list. If our proposal couldn’t touch that, why bother?

Why didn’t I remember this crucial point coming up during our many commission discussions? Maybe I had fallen asleep when the city attorney’s office passed on this all-important information? Maybe I got the memo but I didn’t understand it?

Or maybe I had been sandbagged by a city attorney’s office that, like most of City Hall, wants to keep power out of the hands of the Ethics Commission.

With whatever dignity I could summon, I told Garcetti and Zine to forget the proposal. They were glad to do it.

I stumbled out of the hearing room and into the elevator, going down. On P-2, I got out and walked to my car, grateful for my one perk as an ethics commissioner: free parking at City Hall.

As I drove, I thought of the futility of political reform. I just finished writing a biography of a man who knew everything about politics, Jesse M. Unruh, California Assembly speaker in the 1960s, who liked to say that if you couldn’t take lobbyists’ money, eat their food, drink their booze, sleep with their women and vote against their bills, you didn’t belong in office.

Those were the days when campaign contributions came in cash, packed in paper bags. There were no rules. But when the old-timers took time out from eating, drinking and sleeping around, they passed a lot of good laws.

Since then, righteousness -- more accurately self-righteousness -- has taken over. Even the most unethical politicians have a sanctimonious air. We’ve put up a facade of reform to cover the same old political structure.

At Tuesday’s Ethics Commission meeting, in addition to fining Ludlow, we took a step that could actually repair the structure. We recommended that city elections be financed with public funds. That means candidates would no longer have to cozy up to contractors, land developers, union bosses and the rest of the crew that calls the shots at City Hall. We taxpayers would pay for campaigns.

Now that proposal will join the others in the clutches of the Rules and Elections Committee. It may wind up in the expanding mass burial plot. If it doesn’t, the council will have to approve it, as will the voters. And then a financially strapped City Hall will have to find the money to make it work.

Still, for once, I left the meeting in a decent mood. Maybe I won’t take this job and shove it.