I started a new job as director of Common Cause Hawaii the week the 1983 state legislative session opened.

Although I came to the job with a master’s degree in political science and nearly a decade of experience working in the nonprofit sector in Honolulu, it was all “on the job” training for me as far as learning my way around the state capitol in my new role as advocate and lobbyist for Common Cause, a nonpartisan government watchdog that had grown to national prominence during the Watergate era a decade earlier.

I had to learn my way around the capitol at the same time as I learned the approach that Common Cause took to political issues.

Nonpartisan meant that the organization did not take sides in policy issues that broke along party lines. As a Democrat, I had to learn the Common Cause approach, which focused on “process” issues that Republicans and Democrats could, and did, agree on.

Common Cause believed that public participation in government and the making of public policy was an overarching good, and that making government open and transparent was necessary to enable people to get involved. Ending, or at least limiting, government secrecy and decision-making in those smoky back rooms was among our political goals. Democrats and Republicans could agree that elected and appointed officials should be ethical, and should not misuse their positions to obtain personal benefits for themselves or others. It seemed obvious that public service is a public trust that should not be abused.

We agreed with and promoted the Hawaii State Constitution’s view of ethics: “The people of Hawaii believe that public officers and employees must exhibit the highest standards of ethical conduct and that these standards come from the personal integrity of each individual in government.”

So we worked for stronger ethics laws, and disclosures of potential conflicts of interest. We constantly battled for more public access to government records, confident that without being able to know what public officials were up to, it would be impossible to hold them accountable.

And it wasn’t just the younger generation of Democrats who stood up for these issues. I quickly found that I could rely on a number of Republicans I came to consider reliable allies in these broad nonpartisan issues. I’m thinking of those Republicans who were among our Common Cause members, and several of those serving in the minority at the legislature, who supported those elements of our agenda.

I thought of those days today as the impeachment debate droned on in the House of Representatives. Republicans, it seems, have turned their collective backs on the whole idea of ethics, even to the point of arguing that “abuse of power” isn’t among the “high crimes and misdemeanors” that could justify impeachment.

For a long moment, I just wanted to weep for what we have lost, the belief that traits of honesty, integrity, and high ethical standards are among the most important characteristics for elected officials to display, once a core belief that was shared above and beyond the divides of political party. But, it seems, no more.