SayUncle makes an excellent point at Michael Silence's blog:

Ponder for a moment that the effort to catch these criminals involved an FBI sting that was, by some accounts, three years in the making; involved establishing corporations; involved extensive wiretaps; and it netted five prominent politicos. And this thing runs that deep. It took a great deal of time, money and effort to catch these guys. Obviously, we're not extending that much effort on everyone. So, if it takes that much effort to catch these guys, imagine what isn't being caught.

If it's this hard for law enforcement, what possible hope does an average citizen have of knowing whether he or she is represented by ethical, law-abiding politicians?

Read more after the jump...

With fuzzy campaign finance and ethics laws, special interest lobbying, and "Leadership PACS", there is a lot of quasi-legal money floating around. All of that is bad enough, but how much cash is changing hands under the table, and how would anyone ever know?

Short of making public officeholder's bank statements and tax returns public (which would be onerous and not conducive to attracting good candidates), how would anyone know if they were accepting illegal funds? And with most of it being paid in cash, how would you ever know how much they have buried out in the back yard, or stashed in their freezer?

(And who knew politicians could be bought so cheaply? Some amounts mentioned in the Tennessee Waltz sting are laughably small - $1000 here and $6000 there. Why would someone risk their career and reputation for amounts that small? Even over a period of decades it couldn't add up to much. Unless you are Duke Cunningham or somebody like that, I guess.)

Anyway, it seems like a pretty difficult crime to detect and prosecute. Campaign finance and ethics laws with all their loopholes don't make it any easier. From a moral, ethical, and practical standpoint, what is the difference between "legal" special interest PAC (or "Leadership PAC" slushfund) contributions and bribes? The end result is the same - influence over legislative outcomes for cash.

And going beyond the cash purchase of legislation, there is another can of worms involving conflicts of interest, from real estate developers sitting on local planning commissions to revolving door defense industry influence in Congress, all the way into the White House with Dick Cheney and Halliburton.

We have financial disclosure laws that should help. The Center for Public Integrity has an online database of disclosures for state elected officials. Here are the disclosures for Tennessee legislators.

Unfortunately, many of them don't have much information. There is a check box at the bottom that says "no change since last report" and that's all a lot of them say, such as this one. Which is curious, because if I'm not mistaken it is his first and only report, at least according to the Center for Public Integrity's database.

(To his credit, Sen. Raymond Finney, who represents me from Blount Co. but not my views, files a rather detailed disclosure.)

So there is some information on potential conflicts of interest, PAC contributions, and other sources of income available in these reports. But who verifies the information? (And what politician is going to voluntarily disclose "$10,000 bribe from so and so" in the first place?) And who tracks committee votes or floor votes that could be conflicts of interest based on information in these reports? I'm guessing nobody.

Clearly not every politician is crooked. But money in politics is a serious problem for Democracy, even when it's on the up and up. Something needs to be done about it. I'm not sure anybody knows what that is, though.