Blagojevich, Conscience and the Redemption of Politics
by Fr. Roger Landry - December 19, 2008
In 2005 we dedicated an editorial to Illinois Governor Milorad "Rod" Blagojevich after he signed an executive order compelling Illinois pharmacists — against their conscience, religious beliefs or both — to fill prescriptions for abortion-inducing "morning after" pills. He thought nothing about forcing them to act against their values. In fact he bragged in an interview the following year, "Rather than try to get the legislature to pass something — because we attempted to and they didn't do it — on my own, through executive order action, I forced these guys to fill prescriptions for birth control for women who come in with prescriptions from their doctors."
Now the whole country knows that Governor Blagojevich routinely thought nothing of strong-arming others to do things that are unethical. The 78-page criminal complaint filed by U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald on December 9 accuses Blagojevich of conspiracy to commit mail fraud, wire fraud and of soliciting bribes. It details, through wiretaps, testimony and documentary evidence, how the Governor has engaged in what Fitzgerald called "the most staggering crime spree in office I have ever seen," one that has involved not merely the attempt to auction President-elect Barack Obama's senate seat but several other "pay for play" schemes in which his wife or his political campaign fund have profited.
This comes from a man who campaigned in 2002 as a squeaky-clean ethics reformer after Gov. George Ryan was sent to federal jail for corruption and who in his first term fought for a strict new ethics law that he claimed would have prevented his predecessor's misconduct.
Now we know that that was all a diversion. Blagojevich has been the subject of at least a dozen federal investigations, involving the awarding of state contracts or jobs to those businesses or individuals, respectively, who contributed generously to his campaign fund, employed his wife, repaired his home, or even gave gifts for his daughter's baptism. The Chicago Tribune reported in April about the Governor's $25,000 club, in which 75 percent of businesses, unions and individuals who gave a donation of $25,000 or more to his political campaign fund received benefits from the State of Illinois, including state contracts and appointments to state boards.
In hindsight, we should all realize that someone who does not value the conscience of others probably does not respect, hear and follow the voice of conscience in his own actions. Likewise, we should note that someone who brags about forcing health care providers to dispense drugs they know by their training may kill children in the womb probably wouldn't blink in trying to bully others to do almost anything he wanted.
The first general lesson we learn from the Blagojevich scandals is that character matters — and matters much more than some want to admit. People who lack personal integrity cannot help but bring their personal corruption to office. They reap what they sow and so do we, when we elect and re-elect them. We ultimately get the leaders we deserve, those who represent the values we prioritize.
The second lesson we need to grasp is that this is not an isolated occurrence in our political system. Of course, in details and in degree, what Blagojevich did is exceptional. But we must be candid and self-critical enough to recognize that to a great extent our political system has become a corrupt system exalting self-interest and political quid-pro-quo over the common good. The worse evil in Blagojevich's offering a Senate seat to the highest bidder was not that he would personally and illegally profit from his office; it was that he was considering appointing, at a time when our country needs true leadership to deal with various international and domestic crises, someone who may have been totally unfit to provide that leadership and service to the country. That evil, however, has become so common that we almost cease to notice it any more.
One case in point happened earlier this month when it was revealed that President-elect Obama was not planning to nominate to cabinet positions some Democratic presidential candidates who had endorsed him. Many in the media and the political class expressed surprise at the supposed "slight," as if candidates are somehow entitled, quid pro quo, to a position in a new administration by the mere fact of endorsing the winner, regardless of whether they would be good for the country. Another example is the plague of Congressional pork, which is based on a system of mostly legal quid pro quos in which personal or local interests trump the common good.
That leads to the third lesson: most of us tolerate this system — unethical even if not technically illegal — as long as pork-barrel representatives continue to bring home the bacon for us. At both Beacon Hill and Capitol Hill, not to mention in cities, towns and counties, even those who are charged with serious ethical violations are rarely defeated for re-election; some corrupt public officials resign out of shame, others as part of a plea bargain, but they're rarely tossed out for lack of integrity by the electorate unless they are ineffective in addition to corrupt. Much of our political system has become "pay-to-play," with "payment" being deemed not service to the nation, state, city or town as a whole, but benefits to the constituents at the expense of the good of others. And as long as we get compensated in this way, we generally overlook the questions of integrity and values.
What needs to be done to fix a system that has been corrupted by increasing sums of money and power at both the level of the elected and the electors?
The first thing is a renewed commitment to the common good over personal or community aggrandizement. The selfishness that now permeates every level of our politics needs to be supplanted by the civic virtues that made the greatest generation great. This is, of course, easier said than done, but it is possible — and the national and international crises our country faces are opportunities to learn from the great eras of our history and rediscover a genuine patriotism that makes us capable of sacrificing personal interests and supposed entitlements for the sake of a higher good.
Secondly, there needs to be among elected officials a renewed sense that they are chosen not to be served but to serve. At the present moment, when some public officials talk about being "public servants," those words have about as much credibility as when baseball players represented by agent Scott Boras begin to talk about "love of the game." Especially at higher offices, it is rare when the candidates seems to be palpably motivated by desire to sacrifice themselves for their country rather than to further their personal ambitions in a celebrity-driven culture. As long as we have a professional class of politicians, who have little to lose and much to gain in running for office, and whose lengthy tenures in power make it more likely that they'll be corrupted according to the learned dictum of Lord Acton, this problem will likely perdure.
Lastly, at every level, we must attune ourselves anew to the voice of conscience, which is not our opinion about the way things ought to be, but God's voice whispering to us the way he created them to be. As God is marginalized from the public sphere by secularists who think God is a greater threat to the national good than the absence of God, a culture of corruption will only expand. There's a Polish aphorism that the amount of policemen you need on the streets is inversely proportional to the number of people who police themselves. We could paraphrase this wisdom for our present context by saying that the less officials are attuned to the voice of God the more there will be a need for stricter and more explicit ethical codes and, as we have seen in Illinois, wiretaps and special prosecutions.
None of us is capable of changing the whole system on our own, but each of us is able to lift the whole system up as genuinely Christian leaven, in the example of Christ who dedicated his life to serving others in the truth.
Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.
