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My December 11, 2008, post titled “… a duty of honest services …” led off with this question:  Do public officials owe  ”… a duty of honest services…” to their constituents?  Most of us think they do.  So if they do, what does that duty entail?  Are there penalties for public officials who ignore such a duty?

Yesterday’s unanimous US Supreme Court decision in Skilling v. United States made it clear that while the Court agreed with the legislative intent of 18 USC 1346, the Court would not expand that statute’s interpretation beyond Congress’s intent to confine its application to bribery and kickback schemes. In Skilling the Court held that public officials do have a duty of honest services to their constituents, but until Congress revises the law, failure to perform that duty is criminally punishable only in conjunction with bribery and kickback prosecutions.   The Court’s decision includes a very good discussion of the issue of “unconstitutional vagueness.”  Here is the Wall Street Journal‘s assessment.

It is now left to Congress to address that issue which the Supreme Court properly left to it:  the very amorphous issue of undisclosed self-dealing by public officials.[

At the local level, “undisclosed self-dealing by public officials” refers to state, county, and city officials as well as independent officials such as urban renewal commissioners and others who have decision-making authority to spend public money and who allow their decisions, in whole or in part, to be influenced by those officials’ potential to benefit directly or indirectly from their own decisions.  Thus, Skilling needs to be considered by our own legislature in examining Idaho’s conflict of interest laws.  Don’t hold your breath.