Legislature Needs To Change Ethics Process Now

As predictable as tides, there’s one or two ethics scandals involving South Carolina politicians every year.
            It could be a state senator who makes questionable expenditures with campaign money or a House speaker put in the spotlight over reimbursement rates for airplane expenses. Or it could be a lieutenant governor accused of using campaign cash for personal goodies or a governor questioned about income sources while a member of the legislature.
            Back in the early 1990s, it was so bad that an FBI sting operation netted more than two dozen legislators and lobbyists in a bribery scandal named Operation Lost Trust that caused some ethics rules to change significantly.
            These days, most politicians — city council to statewide officials — are monitored by the S.C. Ethics Commission. But despite Operation Lost Trust, members of the legislature still answer to themselves, a practice that many Statehouse insiders want shifted to the commission. Legislators are required in the state constitution to determine the fate of wayward members of the House or Senate.
“The General Assembly would not consider, in any other context, setting up a system that the people who were judge, prosecutor and jury were drawn from their colleagues,” said Lynn S. Teague of Columbia, a vice president with the League of Women Voters of South Carolina.
The state Senate Ethics Commission met Tuesday to consider a measure that would shift investigatory responsibility for all but technical ethical violations from the House or Senate ethics committee to the Ethics Commission. If the commission found probable cause to believe an offense had been committed, it would forward a recommendation in a report to the appropriate legislative committee to consider whether a violation had occurred and determine a punishment.
In other words, the Commission, not the legislature, would become more like the police, while the legislature would ultimately decide as is required in the state constitution. It’s not a perfect solution, but it can be done without changing the constitution, an arduous process.
The big problem today is the state Senate seems less inclined to move forward with the proposal now. It points to how it handled ethics complaints about former state Sen. Robert Ford, the Charleston Democrat who said he resigned for health reasons amid a brewing ethics scandal.
State Sen. Luke Rankin, the Horry Republican who chairs the Senate Ethics Commission, says there is room for improvement in the way ethics allegations about legislators are handled. “Robert Ford’s example is an uncomfortable but nonetheless good testament that we did it correctly in the Senate,” he said in an interview.
Following an editorial earlier this year that encouraged people to contact state lawmakers if they wanted the legislative ethics process to change, Rankin said he’s not heard a roar from people about change.
But, he admits, the ethics proposal is a “work in progress” for which “time is not running out.” He’s not, he says, trying to kill the measure.
“The right time to fix the roof is before the storm hits,” observed Henry McMaster, a former GOP state attorney general who co-chaired a special gubernatorial commission that made multiple suggestions to improve accountability and transparency.
“The government at all levels should be above suspicion or corruption in order for business to thrive and prosperity to grow,” McMaster told Statehouse Report. “The people must have confidence in their governments at all levels. The best way to do that is to have clear, understandable rules that everyone can follow that send the message to anyone who asks that government in South Carolina is clean, accountable and not corrupt.”
Hear, hear.
It’s time for serious ethics reform. Legislators need to attend to it in the 2014 session — regardless of whether there is a clamor for it among voters. Why? Because it’s the right thing to do. Teague points out that lawmakers don’t question working on government restructuring, clearly an unsexy topic. But they forge on because it needs to be done.
So does ethics reform. Let’s get it right so we can thwart the cycle of ethical scandals that keep giving new material to cable comedians.
 
Andy Brack is publisher of Statehouse Report. He can be reached at: brack@statehousereport.com.