When state legislators passed an ethics bill last March, they surely hoped it would buy them a year or two of not debating their own integrity.
But events have a way of shaping agendas, and the past month offers reason enough for ethics to be back on the General Assembly’s docket come January.
The AJC reported last month that past and present employees of the state ethics commission have accused agency head Holly LaBerge of interfering in a probe of allegations stemming from Gov. Nathan Deal’s 2010 campaign. The claims were made under oath, in lawsuits filed by ex-workers who say they were fired in June 2011 for pursuing the Deal investigation.
Later in September, state Sen. Don Balfour was indicted on 18 counts of filing false expense reports and theft related to his office. The charges against the Snellville Republican followed a lengthy inquiry by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, and a reprimand and $5,000 fine levied by his fellow senators.
Neither underlying case is new. Nor is either case directly related to gifts from lobbyists, the subject of the new ethics law.
But that’s the thing: A limit on lobbyists’ gifts to legislators was always a necessary but insufficient component of the changes we need in our ethics laws.
At the heart of the Deal case is the question of the ethics commission’s independence. That question looms so large now that the commission itself has asked Attorney General Sam Olens to appoint a special outside counsel to investigate the former employees’ claims.
An ethics investigation of the ethics commission, requested by the ethics commission? What more evidence of a broken system does one need?
Even the rebuttal offered by Deal — that “personal agendas” are dogging the state’s watchdog agency — speaks to the need for a better institutional answer than we have now.
As it happens, that answer has been sitting on a shelf, awaiting the right question.
Almost five years ago, then-state Rep. Austin Scott proposed a constitutional amendment to create statewide grand juries specifically to investigate corruption, fraud, bribery and other crimes in state and local government.
At the heart of the idea — which Scott, who at the time was also running for governor and eventually was elected to Congress, acknowledged had been floated before — is Georgia’s need for a truly independent check on political corruption. One that isn’t subject to budget cuts from nervous (or angry) legislators. One that also, speaking to politicians’ enlightened self-interest, would require a higher burden of proof than the frivolous “gotcha” claims they sometimes face at electorally inopportune times.
Or as Scott himself put it in December 2009, shortly after Speaker Glenn Richardson was deposed for his own improprieties, and months after he formally proposed the amendment:
“The need for the people to have a direct means of fighting corruption and holding their elected representatives accountable has been obvious for a long time. The situation we find ourselves in today shows clearly that allowing government bodies to police themselves is unacceptable. Given the current environment, I expect the people of Georgia will demand the passage of this resolution.”
Given the similarity between the environment then and the one now, I expect the people of Georgia still feel that way.
