If there were an occasion, I would be rising to it. But I am not rising.
May 12, 2017
What the Ethics Chief Really Wanted to Say in His Resignation Letter
The Office of Government Ethics director, Walter Shaub, has submitted a letter of resignation. He will depart on July 19 to work for the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center.
“The great privilege and honor of my career has been to lead OGE’s staff and the community of ethics officials in the federal executive branch,” he wrote. “They are committed to protecting the principle that public service is a public trust, requiring employees to place loyalty to the Constitution, the laws, and ethical principles above private gain.”
Shaub told NPR that “the current situation has made it clear that the ethics program needs to be stronger than it is.”
This was much less strongly worded than the previous draft, which ran as follows:
LISTEN, I HAVE TO RESIGN for my own mental health, because I am honestly starting to wonder if I am invisible.
Now that I am leaving, let me ask: Have you gotten any of the warnings about disclosures and conflicts of interest that I have sent for the past numerous months? It seems like you have, and it certainly looked like they had gone through, but—nothing. I go into rooms and clear my throat pointedly and no one even looks up from signing a directive to make sure that our desire to protect our drinking water does not interfere with making golf courses great again.
Most days I feel like I am dropping a copy of the emoluments clause into a dark deep black hole from which nothing, not even radiation, can escape.
Sometimes I send an email with very pointed italics saying “this doesn’t seem okay” but—not even crickets. I think the crickets are dead. I go home and I am sometimes startled when people respond to my voice. Sometimes cats look right through me.
Ideally, we are supposed to suggest ways of resolving conflicts, but people have to WANT to resolve conflicts. Right now, the only blind trust that Donald Trump has is the blind trust that the American people have placed in him to run his business appropriately.
And what’s worse is that, somehow, it seems like literally everyone outside the administration has gotten the idea that they ought to call me to tell me about ethics violations. I appreciate it. It makes me feel wanted, I guess. It is nice to have thousands upon thousands of calls. I think they think that I can stop it, somehow. But I can’t. All I can do is suggest until I am blue in the face. And I am. If my face is still visible, which I sincerely doubt.
I hope that, in future, people understand what the Office of Government Ethics can and cannot do. What it can do is SUGGEST, even going so far as to use ITALICS, but we don’t have investigative powers, and for a while I was worried we might not even be able to compel disclosures. That is up to Congress. I am not saying “please stop calling us,” but I feel like people keep telling me about cats in trees under the misapprehension that I can run off and change into a lifesaving spandex outfit and rescue them, and in fact I am just a mild-mannered fellow who can write a memo saying that the cat ought to be looked into.
This is wearing on me, as it wears on the other employees. It seems wasteful to have an entire office of seventy people whose entire job is to make suggestions that nobody listens to. It makes us feel like ghosts.
After a certain point you could just get a printed sign that says DON’T DO ANY OF THIS and it might do as good a job, and the sign wouldn’t get depressed and think to itself, “Is my whole life a waste? Does my voice even make a sound?”
Honestly, do we need an Office of Government Ethics? If this is how you’re going to treat it, I think not. Sometimes I lie awake in the vast loneliness where I exist and no one takes notice of me, and I wonder if ethics might not be obsolete, anyway. They are cumbersome. They take sacrifices. They require you to comply and eliminate conflicts, not rush to conflicts and fan them. Never let it be said that Donald Trump backed down from a conflict. His business holdings reflect this, I think. I don’t know. Nobody knows, because his tax returns are still a riddle wrapped in an enigma surrounded by an impenetrable wall of darkness and lawyers.
Speaking of lawyers, I understand that we are draining the swamp by filling the swamp with apex predators and letting them fight it out, so perhaps all these outdated rules about hiring lobbyists and industry types need to be chucked into the swamp too, to see if they survive. They probably won’t, but that will mean less paperwork for everyone.
And I have had enough.
One thing remains for me to do, and then my journey is ended. I will put ethics on my shoulder and walk and walk until I come to a place where no man knows what they are. Oops, I am already there. Well, never mind. I will continue to walk, because this is no way to live.
July 7, 2017
A Moderate Speaks: By God, Won’t Someone Else Take a Stand?
THIS IS NOT THE SENATE that I believe in.
I look around and see only the ruin of this once-great democratic institution. What has become of the process? Where are the committees? Where is the deliberation?
This bill is bad, and it was made in a process that was even worse. The courageous thing to do would be to stand against it. And yet no one will, not even me.
I am disgusted.
Bills ought to be passed with deliberation by committees. Change should
