Office of Public Integrity

OFFICE OF PUBLIC INTEGRITY

Ms. COLLINS. Mr. President, I do not anticipate taking the full 15 minutes, but I did want to alert my colleagues to an amendment that I believe will be coming up this afternoon, or perhaps even later this morning. In any event, later today Senators MCCAIN, LIEBERMAN, and I will be offering an amendment to the ethics bill before us to create an Office of Public Integrity.

The American people view the way that we enforce ethics requirements on each other and on our staff as an inherently conflicted process. We set our own rules, we are our own advisers, we are our own investigators, we are our own prosecutors, we are our own judges, and we are our own juries. Even though we have some of our finest Members serving on the Ethics Committee, they cannot escape the perception that the process is plagued by conflict of interest. We do have extraordinary capable, ethical individuals serving on the Ethics Committee in the Senate. We are very fortunate to have a committee that works in harmony and that takes its job very seriously.

I believe we can preserve the important role of the Ethics Committee--and it is a vital role because the Constitution requires each House of Congress to discipline its own Members, if necessary, and we are going to preserve that absolutely critical role--but that we can make an improvement in the process by creating a congressional office, the Office of Public Integrity.

I emphasize this is part of the legislative branch. We are not talking, as some have, about creating an outside commission of judges and former Members of Congress and ethics experts. We are talking about recognizing that the Constitution clearly places responsibility within the legislative branch for taking actions, if necessary, against its own Members who violate the House or Senate rules. But we believe that process would be enhanced if we create an office of public integrity. It would be headed by a director who would be appointed by the majority and minority leaders of the Senate. That office would conduct investigations of possible ethics violations independent of any direct supervision by the Senate. So we would be assured that the public would perceive the process--the investigation--as more credible than now occurs when the Ethics Committee is investigating allegations against their colleagues.

I wish to point out, however, this is not the Shays-Meehan bill in the House, whatever the merits of that approach. This is a different approach from that taken by the Senator from Illinois, Senator Obama, and it is even different from the proposal Senator Lieberman and I advanced in the Homeland Security markup. We have refined it still further. We narrowed the authority of the Office of Public Integrity, and I think we struck exactly the right balance between the duties of this office and the duties of the Ethics Committee. This office would conduct impartial, independent, thorough investigations and report its findings to the Ethics Committee which then would retain authority to rule on the cases and allegations and decide what action, if any, is taken. This would enhance the public confidence that this investigation would be an independent one.

It is very difficult for us to investigate ourselves. There are friendships, there are inherent conflicts of interest. The Ethics Committee does a terrific job in the Senate. It has wonderful members serving on it, individuals of the highest integrity. But the public perception is always going to be that this is an inherently conflicted process because we are investigating ourselves. We are playing every role in the process. What we are trying to do is create an office that would conduct the investigation.

I know many of our colleagues are not comfortable with this concept. Some of them have compared it to the old special prosecutor laws. But that is not what we are doing. We are very carefully setting up a system of checks and balances with the Ethics Committee retaining all of the final authority to decide how to proceed, to decide whether subpoenas should be employed, to decide whether an investigation should go forward in the first place, and to decide the ultimate disposition of the case.

The investigation would be done by this independent office.

I point out to my colleagues one of the advantages of having an independent Office of Public Integrity conduct the investigation. The public now is often skeptical of the findings and actions taken by the Ethics Committee. If the Office of Public Integrity comes to the Ethics Committee and says these allegations have been thoroughly investigated, we, an independent entity, have investigated these allegations and we find there is no truth to them, that finding is much more likely to be accepted by the public if the investigation is done by this independent office. It would have complete credibility. That would be a great advantage. It would remove the cloud of doubt and suspicion that often hangs over Members of Congress unfairly when allegations are made against them.

The reason the public often has those doubts is they know we are investigating ourselves. They know our colleagues are investigating allegations against their colleagues.

If we insert this Office of Public Integrity into the process, public confidence in the thoroughness, independence, and credibility of the investigations would be enhanced. It would in no way diminish the authority of the Ethics Committee to take the action, make the final judgments, and indeed judgments all along the way, on this case.

I reserve the remainder of my time.

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