Ethics Newsline®

Rushworth Kidder’s commentary last week drew many responses from readers, not all of whom agreed with his contention that talk-show host Rush Limbaugh made a faulty assumption that “if it’s legal it must be ethical” when urging Republicans to cross over and vote for Hillary Clinton in an effort to elongate the bruising Democratic primary season. (The commentary also expressed disappointment with the number of Republicans who followed Limbaugh’s urgings.)

One reader wrote that “Rush Limbaugh’s Operation Chaos asked voters to do what they always do — use their vote to influence an election’s outcome. Republicans simply used their vote to good effect. I saw no ethical lapse here.”

Another reader, while agreeing that Limbaugh’s strategy was unethical, took issue with the assumption that the motive behind a primary is to allow a party’s own voters to decide their nominees: “I don’t think that statement accounts for those states where crossover voting is allowed, where any person, enrolled in any party or independent, can vote in any party primary. That arrangement says to me that something other than allowing the party faithful to determine their candidates was in the mind of the legislature.”

And from a reader in Pennsylvania: “I myself, while being a right-leaning independent, have always registered as a Democrat on the sound advice of my mother, actually. She told me always to register with whichever party most often controlled local politics. That way you are not perceived as bucking City Hall, plus which you have some say in who will run against the preferred (presumably more conservative in my case) candidate in the November election…. Ethical or no, her advice has proven pretty practical over the years!”

– Compiled by Ethics Newsline® editor Carl Hausman