State House members who don't pay ethics fines would lose their seats on committees under a new rule lawmakers adopted Wednesday.
The House voted 147-4 to approve the change after adopting a bipartisan compromise that allows lawmakers to appeal to the House Ethics Committee.
The resolution, introduced by Majority Leader Larry O'Neal, R-Bonaire, says simply that if House members are delinquent in paying fines levied by the state ethics commission, they immediately lose their seat on all House committees. Members typically serve on multiple committees.
"Make no mistake," O'Neal said as he presented the bill to the House Rules Committee, which agreed to move the bill for a vote on the House floor. "The purpose of the rule change is to be able to sanction our own folks because I for one, if it happens to me, I’ll be embarrassed by me. But I’m embarrassed publicly every time I hear there are delinquencies in these technical fines."
Because the resolution would not change state law, only the House rules, the measure would not apply to state senators. Sen. John Crosby, R-Tifton, the chairman of the Senate Ethics Committee, declined to be interviewed about whether he planned a similar resolution for senators.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported in May that 47 state lawmakers, or about 20 percent of the General Assembly, owed the state money for ethics violations. While the sums were relatively small, some of the fees dated back almost a decade. The fines are imposed by the state ethics commission.
O'Neal's first draft of the resolution, introduced Tuesday, did not include the appeals process. Democrats asked for the change because of ongoing disputes between Democratic and Republican lawmakers with the state ethics commission over late fines.
Before 2010, most reports filed with the commission, including campaign finance reports and personal financial disclosures, were filed by paper; now, it's all done electronically. The commission has ruled that several lawmakers either filed those pre-2010 reports late or not at all and assessed fines, said Minority Leader Stacey Abrams, D-Atlanta. They are working with the commission to investigate further, Abrams said, but those lawmakers who are contesting the commission's finding would have been stripped of committee assignments under the original draft of the resolution.
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