Senators still blocking ethics reform effort

A new state ethics reform bill – once considered a top priority for this legislative session – was jolted back to life in the state Senate recently. But hopes are slim that it won’t flat-line again.

A Senate panel voted 21-2 on March 10 to revive the effort to toughen the state’s ethics laws. But most observers give it little chance of passing this year on the Senate floor.

Why? A large number of Democratic senators and some Republicans have adamantly refused to support a bill that would revamp the State Ethics Commission to independently investigate accusations of ethics violations by state lawmakers. The Senate Judiciary Committee took up a House-passed ethics bill, but rather than consider that bill, the committee replaced its language with a proposal nearly the same as one that died in the Senate in February.

Ethics complaints now are investigated by ethics committees in the House and Senate, meaning that members of those bodies essentially are investigating their own peers. Under the House bill and a bill sponsored by Senate Judiciary Chairman Larry Martin, R-Pickens, last month, a restructured State Ethics Commission would have been charged with investigating legislators.

But a majority of senators now support an alternative plan sponsored by Sen. Luke Rankin, R-Horry, that keeps lawmakers involved in investigating themselves. Rankin proposed a new ethics panel made up of lawmakers and members of the public to handle only ethics complaints against lawmakers.

But it is worth asking why Rankin and those who support his plan place so much emphasis on keeping lawmakers directly involved in the investigative process. Lynn Teague of the League of Women Voters offers a plausible reason: “They wouldn’t be insisting on legislators being on that committee if they didn’t think those legislators could control the outcomes.”

Gov. Nikki Haley, who, along with House Speaker Jay Lucas, R-Hartsville, has been strongly championing ethics reform this year, openly singled out Rankin and Senate President Hugh Leatherman, R-Florence, for obstructing the reform effort. The governor said the public would not be able to trust the process proposed by Rankin.

Part of the rationale offered by Rankin for creating a new commission composed of lawmakers and public citizens is that the current State Ethics Commission is overworked investigating ethics complaints relating to all state and local public officials other than lawmakers. But the primary reason the commission can’t handle its workload is because lawmakers fail to provide the money for enough staff to do the job.

Haley is right. The only investigative commission that would have any real credibility is an independent panel that conducts its business in public.

A bill that creates such a commission could have been well on it way to her desk for signature by now if the Senate had followed the lead of the House. Instead, ethics reform was hijacked by senators who don’t want to cede direct control over the process.

This sends the message that many senators consider themselves a privileged class whose actions relating to their public service should not be subjected to scrutiny by disinterested investigators. But good government demands that elected officials operate openly and transparently, which requires independent oversight.

The state’s ethics laws have not been changed in 20 years, and we hope this is not the end of the struggle to enact meaningful reforms. Unfortunately, it appears that a few senators may be capable of derailing this effort.

This story was originally published March 22, 2015 at 7:25 PM with the headline "Senators still blocking ethics reform effort."