The Hillary loophole - Hillary Clinton

Washington Monthly, May, 1992 by Katherine Boo

Married ... with influence

Better yet, consider former San Francisco mayor and California gubernatorial candidate Dianne Feinstein, whose husband is affluent money manager Richard Blum. Instead of printing soul-searching columns about Blum's right to his own career, the San Francisco, Oakland, and Los Angeles papers have marshalled reporting teams to comb his records for conflicts for a decade. Although the investigations have occasionally veered toward zealotry, the premise is perfectly sound: Public interest requires that potential conflicts of interest be explored.

"Blum's business clearly has benefited from the union and the networking opportunities," concluded the Los Angeles Times censoriously-and accurately-after a review of Blum's myriad business partnerships in 1990. The same could probably be said of the careers of Hillary Clinton, Ruth Harkin, Chris Downey, Barbara Lent, and other political wives. It isn't. Still, what's most interesting about the Blum case isn't the conclusions the media drew. It's what the media brought to light: no megascandals, simply the fact that Blum worked for hotel and insurance interests vying for multimillion-dollar contracts with the city of San Francisco.

Making that information public didn't deal a fatal blow to Feinstein's political career, nor should it have. Rather, public awareness of her vested interest surely made Feinstein a lot more careful, and perhaps more equitable, as she voted on those issues. Was that unfair to Feinstein and Blum? It would have been far less fair to the public not to know that a generous city redevelopment contract was going to a partner of the mayor's husband.

That's exactly the kind of information we don't have on many political wives. While federal criminal law prohibits executive branch employees from taking actions that benefit their own or their spouses' financial interests, Congress has exempted itself from that law. And it's also awarded its spouses generous exemptions on the financial disclosure forms members are required to file. For instance, congressmen must disclose where a wife gets her money, but not what she does nor how much she earns for doing it. (How much did Chris Downey make? Salary," responds her disclosure report helpfully.)

Meanwhile, don't look to the House and Senate ethics committees to initiate investigations of potential conflicts; they simply wait, delphically, to be asked. And they don't get asked very often. Between 1977 and 1987 (the latest date available), the House ethics committee gave careful consideration to dozens of questions concerning donations of doughnuts and trinkets to congressional staffers, but only two questions involving the propriety of spousal careers. In both cases, the committee left the determination of potential conflict of interest to the members and spouses themselves.

Is there a better way to protect public interest, one that doesn't condemn spouses to the kitchen? Sure there is-and Congress had a hand in coming up with it in 1989, when Carla Hills was appointed U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) and her husband's career came under scrutiny. A former SEC chairman and managing partner at Latham Watkins who represented a Japanese trading giant, Roderick Hills wasn't happy about rearranging his professional life. But Washington politicians, faced with the alternative -allowing the spouse to represent interests whose fates were controlled by his wife-and freed from fear of being called sexist, could see pretty clearly which claim weighed more heavily on national interest. By the time of Carla Hills' confirmation, Roderick Hills had agreed to terminate all business relationships that might pose a conflict of interest, promised to keep the USTR apprised of his planned business activities, and agreed not to take on any new clients without the approval of the Office of Government Ethics.