Dean's Address

We see all around us the cancer of money placing insurmountable pressures on politicians to obtain campaign contributions, PAC contributions, and honoraria. This money makes legislators slowly give up their independence in order to get re‑elected. The costs of getting elected and being re‑elected have become astronomical.

According to Common Cause, the political watchdog group, successful candidates for the U.S. Senate in the 1988 elections spent an average of $4 million each. That's almost $13,000 per week for six years! The average congressional race costs an incumbent $500,000.

How do congressmen finance these sums? Common Cause reports that PAC contributions to congressional candidates have climbed from $12 million in the 1974 elections to $150 million in the 1988 campaigns. Special interest PACs gave House and Senate incumbents $115 million for their 1988 campaigns. Challengers received only $17 million. For the 1988 elections, PAC gave House Members $8 for every $1 given to their challengers. Seventeen winning Senators each raised over $1 million in PAC money.

The too obvious result: 98 percent of incumbents who sought reelection won! More troubling, what is the quid pro quo for the contributions? Good government? Easy access for the donee? Favorable treatment? Whatever the reason, whether pure or innocent, the public believes that there is no such thing as a "free lunch." The public believes that these contributions, however well intentioned, win be reciprocated in some other form.

Moreover, 40 to 60 percent of a Congressman's time is spent in returning contributors' calls and in fundraising. Every Congressman I met and discussed this problem with complained that if they could eliminate one practice, it was the contributor phone calls, the fundraising party, and the meeting to ask for money.

Legislation is pending that would dramatically reduce the role of PACs in congressional elections and limit overall campaign spending and the use of personal wealth. The honoraria, the PACs, and the campaign contributions must be eliminated. This needed reform is not a hopeless ideal, not a pious platitude, but is an actual, moral imperative which must be enacted now.

At the federal level, Congress and the president have started raising salaries for Congress, the judiciary, and executive branch officials. We still need legislation for publicly financed elections patterned after presidential elections, with limited but free radio and TV., as in Europe.

Are these proposals too naive or too idealistic? Have we begun to answer the questions of political trust by saying that by its public nature, it requires obedience to a permanent core of political ethics; one that sets public men and women apart, or shall we assume that life after Wright will be "business as usual?" Or, perhaps there is a pragmatic reason for ethics in government ‑the restoration of the public's confidence in government which is essential to a functioning democracy.

We, as lawyers, have always enjoyed a special role in the government of this country. As lawyers, we understand the need for ethical restraints and independence. We must keep the fire of ethics and integrity alive. For if we do not keep the flame alive, the government, which is lawyer‑driven, will not either. If we truly believe in this noble and privileged profession, we must now, more than ever, stand up and be counted ‑ not by simply paying lip service to ethics but by living them.

Without reform, the "rule of the law" becomes the rule of lobbyists, the rule of leverage, or the rule of legislators for life.

Let us together rededicate ourselves to the proposition that, above all, our commitment as lawyers is to the rule of law and that leadership in ethics is absolutely necessary if we are to sustain our profession and our country. Let us, therefore, in whatever way we choose, here and now rededicate ourselves to these principles for which so many have given so much for so long.