Remarks of Senator Carl Levin at the Paul H. Douglas Ethics in Government Award Ceremony

Remarks of Senator Carl Levin at the Paul H. Douglas Ethics in Government Award Ceremony

Calling him a "champion throughout [his] career in promoting ethics in government," and citing his "dedicated efforts to combat public corruption, streamline government processes, protect the rights of whistleblowers, and reduce waste, fraud, and abuse," the Institute of Government and Public Affairs at the University of Illinois has named Senator Carl Levin, D-Mich., as the 2006 recipient of the Paul H. Douglas Ethics in Government Award. more>

Senator Levin's remarks at the awards ceremony follow.

Bill, thank you for your very kind words. We're sorry to lose you to Illinois. It's the last thing we've lost to Illinois since, by the way. But, you were a loss. A number of people, not just the students but the faculty, really, really admired you when you were there. To this day they still talk about the time you were there. Thank you.

Dick Durbin, your words, your tribute, is extraordinarily meaningful to me. The fact that you're here, obviously, is important, but the amount of sentiment that you put into those words truly is significant to me and I shall always remember them.

This award, the Douglas award, I think there's only one thing missing - It says scholar, patriot, statesman. I'm not sure of any of those, but the missing word here is "rumpled." That should be added to the award from here on in.

I don't want to disappoint my wife or my brother by not telling this story about one of my campaigns. This rumpled look of mine has been - I've survived, let's put it that way. Before I tell this story, let me introduce my wife, Barbara, who's heard this story a few times and she still laughs at it. This is my wife, Barbara.

My second race was against an astronaut. His name was Jack Lousma. He was a very, very nice guy; very good looking guy. Six foot two, something like that. No political experience. And he printed up some literature which started off with his physical characteristics, unlike any political literature I've ever seen. It started off with his physical appearance: 6'2", 185 pounds, blond hair and blue eyes. And my staff got nervous with the "blond hair and blue eyes," because they thought there was a subtle message in there because I'm Jewish, and I said to my staff, no there isn't. He's ex-military and it was probably the way they started off some of their resumes - let's have a little fun with this one.

So I started campaign speeches this way - "Well, now my opponent has put out this literature with his physical appearances. We've done some polling on this issue. And we're throwing out all of my literature tomorrow. We've reprinted it and we're starting out with my physical characteristics - 5'9-1/2", 190 pounds, balding and disheveled, and plump." I don't want to leave that out. "Plump, balding and disheveled." And then the punch line was, "Folks, our pollsters tell us there's more of us than there is of them!"

I hope I have some other characteristics in common with Paul Douglas, but I'm glad to hear that that one also applied.

I've introduced my wife, Barbara. My wife and my brother, Sandy. My brother Sandy and I learned ethics at the same dinner table. My parents talked a lot about ethics and values and morality. He taught me a lot about it, my brother. He's older than I am, although he tries to pretend at times he's not, particularly when we play squash together. But I'm glad that he was able to come by.

My two colleagues who are here, I see Jack Reed was here and still is. Jack is someone I rely on so incredibly heavily on the Armed Services Committee. Thank you for coming, Jack. I thought I saw Mark Dayton. I don't know if I really did or not. Mark Dayton from Minnesota. Mark is leaving us after one term in the Senate, and I'm going to have some things to say about him tomorrow. But he is a man of great, great passion and we will miss you. Thank you both for coming.

Jean, thank you for your very kind remarks. We have the same alma mater, as you mentioned. It had a major effect on our lives when we were there, with some years in common, and I won't say who graduated first. We fought some of the same causes together, including the fight against Joe McCarthy back in 1954. That was a fight, which Swarthmore students weighed in against Joe McCarthy and we were some of the few people actually in the country who came to Washington to lobby our senator at that time to support the censure of Joe McCarthy. It was a very important experience in my life, and I'll just kind of leave it at that. But we did a lot of things together at Swarthmore as students, some of which were probably legal as a matter of fact.

My staff is here. I'm not going to mention them all. My chief of staff, representing them, I'll just name David Lyles. Paul Douglas knew the importance of staff to a member. I don't have to tell my colleagues here or anyone else here about the importance of staff. But they are so critical to any successes we have that we should never overlook the importance of our staff. I just hope that when my time comes to leave that my staff will think half as well of me as Paul Douglas' staff thought of him. It's a real tribute to Paul Douglas that you remember him and so many others here remember him so fondly.

I heard the word "idiosyncrasies" used to refer to Paul Douglas; staff understanding and surviving his idiosyncrasies. My staff, it's not the idiosyncrasies that they have to survive, I've overheard the word "weirdness." It's the more likely word.

Paul Douglas' voice resonates still in Dick Durbin, who is literally our voice in the Senate Democratic Caucus. We use the word these days frequently, "message," which I personally am kind of tired of, perhaps. It sounds a little cold. But nonetheless, what Dick Durbin does for our caucus is try to help us put into words that will resonate with the American people. He spends a good deal of his life trying to help those of us who aren't nearly as good with words as he is to gain that capability so that we can communicate. He's our go-to guy for message to try to state in words what our party openly stands for everyday. And he's now been joined by Barack Obama. Thank you, Illinois, for sending us Barack Obama. He's a really great addition to the U.S. Senate.

The opening words of Paul Douglas' book, Ethics in Government, have already been quoted: "The American public has become increasingly uneasy in recent months about the moral practices of many government officials." And how those words ring true today as Washington reels from lobbying and bribery scandals that will send several lobbyists and at least two members of Congress to prison.

In his book, Paul Douglas summarized the scandals plaguing that era, and then he made this observation. He said,

"After such revelations as I have cited, people are apt to believe that ours is a degenerate age and that we have lost ground morally. Men who are disgusted with the present picture the past as a Golden Age in which citizens were virtuous and public officials impeccable….The practical effect of this attitude is often to discourage people and give them a deep inferiority complex about their own times."

Well, today, it is easy to be discouraged. The headlines have been dominated by golf trips to Scotland and the selling of legislative favors. Behind the scenes, there has been a blurring of the lines between lobbyists and members, as lobbyists write bills and members seek direction from lobbyists before they act on legislation. The revolving door spins rapidly as members leave office to take lucrative jobs with those who lobbied them.

But as Paul Douglas knew, the abuses we see that we see today need to be a call to action, not a cause for discouragement.

When Bill Cohen and I and others - Bill Cohen was one of the awardees of the Paul Douglas award - when he and I and a number of others went into action to enact a lobbying reform bill in the early 1990s, we were cautioned by those who were somewhat older and undoubtedly wiser that this was a thankless and perhaps impossible undertaking.

Decade after decade, Congress had tried to close the loopholes in the 1946 act, and decade after decade, those efforts had failed.

President Truman called for reform in 1948. It was not heeded. Senator McClellan's reform efforts in the 1950's reached a dead-end. The lobbying reform bill that passed the Senate in the 1960's was never taken up in the House, even though it had been endorsed by President Johnson. The lobbying reform bills that were approved by both Houses of Congress in 1976 could not be reconciled in conference. And they went nowhere. The lobbying reform bill approved by the House in 1978 never left committee in the Senate.

As a result, the loopholes had grown larger and larger. No one was plugging the new gaps, while many were working in the opposite direction to make those gaps bigger.

By the early 1990s, the country was adequately fed up and we were able to push through Congress the bipartisan Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995.

That act required paid professional lobbyists to register and disclose whom they represent, how much they are paid, and the issues on which they are lobbying.

Although we were proud of that effort, and it was a real step forward, we knew that it too would eventually need updating, because there is an armada of lawyers working day and night to find loopholes and create new schemes that dance around this law's specifics, like any other law's specifics.

Some of what we are seeing today is already illegal under the 1995 law, but recent events have made clear that loopholes have been found. We need to close those loopholes before public outrage over the Abramoff scandals fades.

Even if we succeed in doing so today, and this is my message, we won't solve the problem forever. We'll never pass a "perfect" lobbying law or a law which can't be evaded because those who seek to find a system's weaknesses won't rest. We can't rest either -- standing for honesty and openness in government will forever be an unfinished task. Constant vigilance is required.

The same is true for so many ethical issues we face: we have to keep fighting them day in and day out, year in and year out.

In the wake of corporate scandals at Enron, Worldcom, and others, we passed the Sarbanes-Oxley accounting reform act to try to crack down on abuses and restore public trust in our system.

Over the past three years, the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations has uncovered outrageous abuses involving offshore tax havens and homegrown tax shelters that cost taxpayers $100 billion or more each year in unpaid taxes. I hope the Senate will soon pass our Tax Shelter and Tax Haven Reform Act, which Senator Coleman and I have sponsored on a bipartisan basis. It increases penalties on those who aid and abet tax evasion and begins to close that totally unfair tax gap.

We have to tackle abuses tirelessly and head on - as Paul Douglas did in his day - if we are to stay ahead of those, as Paul Douglas put it so eloquently, those who have let "the weeds of the flesh choke the flowers of the spirit."

Thank you again for this honor. It's a wonderful award. Its timeless relevance is a reminder that constant vigilance is a price we should willingly pay to ensure that the clean, ethical, open government that our people deserve is provided to them.

Again, thank you all. This is an award that I will treasure. I thank the family, the university, my colleagues and all of you who keep this spirit of Paul Douglas alive

http://levin.senate.gov/newsroom/release.cfm?id=263966