[Opinion] Dining With a Toothpick

The National Assembly`s ethics committee was created in July 1991 in the last days of the Roh Tae-woo administration. The first chairman of the committee was Democratic Liberal Party (now Grand National Party) lawmaker Nam Jae-hee. When the 14th National Assembly was launched the next year, lawmaker Lee Jong-geun became the chairman of the committee and served for the next four years. Lawmaker Lee was from Cheongju, Northern Chungcheong Province, and graduated the Korea Military Academy together with Kim Jong-pil.

Lee used to come up to Seoul only when the General Assembly was in a session and stay at his daughter’s house while he was doing his parliamentary activities. When many lawmakers were panicked by the measure of compulsory disclosure of assets for public officials, and busy hiding wealth amassed under their children’s names while making only lame excuses, he stayed calm, saying, “I didn’t give a penny to my children even when they were getting married.”

Although he was a six-term lawmaker, Lee didn’t spend a dime from his expense account while serving as the ethics committee chairman. Instead, he used to save the expediency fund and evenly distributed it to the committee members at the end of every year. Under the Kim Young-sam administration, not many ruling party members had financial difficulty. So some would complain, saying, “It is such a small amount of money. I just hope Lee would use the fund in paying for a cab rather than make us bother to come to receive it.”

In the U.S., the outline of ethics bill that the Democratic leadership in Congress had promised has just been revealed. The Wall Street Journal covered the ethics bill, which is likely to be passed within this month, and called it a “toothpick rule.” Under the act, lawmakers are banned from accepting almost any meals from lobbyists, except for "food that you can eat standing up using a toothpick.” In response, lobbyists for the seafood industry hastily changed their original plan to serve up lawmakers raw oyster appetizers and oyster pasta. Raw oysters are still on the menu but the oyster pasta is gone, as pasta would be difficult to eat with toothpicks.

In the U.S., many congressmen commute from their local constituencies to Washington on private planes. It seems that providing seats on planes to congressmen will be much more difficult from now on. Although the bill bans many things, a helicopter has become an exception because the bill bans the use of fixed-wing aircraft. The U.S. Congress is praising the new bill as the strongest and far-reaching ethics reforms since the Watergate scandal. But lawmaker Lee Jong-geun, who passed away a few years ago, might have even refused to dine with a toothpick.

Kim Chang-hyeok, Editorial Writer, chang@donga.com