The Nation - News from Feb. 15, 1989

President Bush’s ethics commission agreed that members of Congress should continue to be exempt from the basic conflict of interest law that prohibits making government decisions for personal gain. Although Bush charged the panel last month with finding standards that are “equitable all across the three branches of the federal government,” panel members concluded that Congress could not be put under the same constraints as judges and the executive branch. The basic federal conflict of interest law, known as section 208 of the criminal code, makes it a crime for an executive branch employee to take any government action in which he or his immediate family has a financial interest. Judges are prohibited from hearing a case involving any of their assets.