Ezra Klein Quotes
I do think that there is a very unclear level of conduct in the Trump administration. That's one reason you're seeing this among so many different secretaries. Again, Trump himself has been bending ethics rules left and right.
Klein, Ezra. Interview by Brian Stelter. Reliable Sources, CNN, 2018.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910
California legislators do not have the kind of individual powers and discretion that other legislatures such as New York have. The result is that lobbyist and powerful special interests cannot assure a benefit if they invest in a legislator in California and the temptations in California are therefore less leading to less corruption.
This quotation was ridiculed at the time. Virginia had very lax political ethical laws and regulations for politicians and in that year, both the Republican Governor and the Republican Attorney General had accepted large gifts from businessmen of the state which in other states would have been considered as bribes and be illegal. The rules in Virginia were so lax, that expensive gifts were given to members of politician’s family. In one case that year, a businessman paid for the Governor’s daughter’s expensive wedding. With both houses of the state legislature also in Republican hands, there was no oversight or investigations. It was only though the efforts of the press that the facts emerged. Howell did not say or do anything about the situation. Although in 2013 it was Republicans who were corrupt, the same lax rules had prevailed for years and when they were in power the Democrats made no effort to tighten the ethics laws and rules.
Ezra Klein is an American journalist, political analyst, New York Times columnist, and the host of The Ezra Klein Show podcast. He is a co-founder of Vox and formerly served as the website's editor-at-large. He has held editorial positions at The Washington Post and The American Prospect, and was a regular contributor to Bloomberg News and MSNBC. His first book, Why We're Polarized, was published by Simon & Schuster in January 2020.
