By defining a problem, you define its solution. In recent weeks, Gov. Nathan Deal has provided a depressing example of how that process can lead you very much astray.
Last week, news broke that state officials may be close to settling a second major whistleblower case filed against the state ethics commission, this time agreeing to pay $1 million in damages and legal fees to the commission’s former deputy director, Sherilyn Streicker. According to Streicker, the commission had forced her out of her job in 2011 as a way to block an investigation into Deal’s 2010 campaign spending.
If the seven-figure settlement is finalized, state officials will in effect concede that Streicker has enough evidence to win her case before a jury. And there’s not much doubt that she does. In April, a jury awarded Streicker’s former boss, Stacey Kalberman, $1.3 million, based on that same overwhelming evidence and testimony. So far, that would be $2.3 million in taxpayer money paid out to civil servants who were barred from doing their job as part of an attempted political coverup.
Deal’s office and re-election campaign continue to stress that no one in the governor’s office has been implicated in the coverup, which isn’t completely true. Testimony has made it clear that as secret arrangements were being made to push Kalberman and Streicker out the door, the governor’s office was involved in finding and vetting a replacement for Kalberman.
Clearly, something went very, very wrong. Ethics commission members who were supposed to help enforce state law instead acted as if their role was to protect the high and mighty. Rather than let the Deal investigation run its course, they intervened to stop it and concocted a flimsy cover story to disguise their actions.
Deal, however, seems to have taken a different lesson from the controversy. Late last month, he suggested that future such payouts could be avoided if legislators change state law to deny whistleblower status to state employees, such as those at the ethics commission, who perform an investigative role.
That’s one way to solve the “problem,” at least if you define the problem as “embarrassing public revelations about how power really works in Georgia.” If Streicker and Kalberman were not eligible to file whistleblower suits, their claims of retaliation could not have been considered in a court of law. If a court could not hear their allegations, neither woman would have been granted a seven-figure damage award, and allegations of a coverup would remain just that, unproved allegations.
What a tidy world that would be, right?
Personally, I define the problem differently. I think it can be traced to an eagerness by Georgia’s political leadership over the last few years to defang an already docile ethics commission. Its budget has been slashed; its authority has been significantly reduced; its supposed independence — necessary for any watchdog agency — has been badly compromised. State leaders did everything they could to gut the agency short of abolishing it altogether, yet somehow Kalberman and Streicker still got their stories heard.
Closing even that legal avenue might solve Deal’s problem. It doesn’t solve ours.
