How is this not illegal?
What kind of legislation could be put forward to make such clearly unethical behavior illegal?
What kind of legislation could be put forward to make such clearly unethical behavior illegal?
It's actually quite easy to explain. The legislature decides what laws get passed, which means they decide what is legal and illegal.
Every election candidates all over the nation promise to go and "clean up washington" and some of them even try. What they don't ever do is make a meaningful dent because those do gooders have to get reforms passed through the very legislature they just got elected to serve with by calling their new coworkers dirty.
Ethics regs within the legislature are mostly a CYA attempt to make it look like they are ethical, but really what they're doing is making the paperwork for unethical behavior look clean. That's why the DC establishment fixated on Trump's taxes so much. He never set up his finances to look like a politician's, so it would be easy to paint him as unethical while a whole branch of government is filled with politicians who somehow become multimillionaires on low six figure government salaries with "clean" paperwork.
Even a constitutional amendment at this point would probably fall short of cleaning it up, unless it was so carefully crafted so as to never gain the popular support needed for passage.