Here’s a page Georgia might want to consider taking out of Alabama’s book. It’s the page that says ethics law needs enough money to buy it some teeth.
You’ll recall that earlier this month, word came out of Atlanta that the former state Ethics Commission (it’s now called something long and bureaucratic that even people who work there probably can’t remember) is so underfunded that enforcement of Georgia’s theoretically tough new ethics laws is kind of a sham. Its budget has been cut by more than 40 percent since 2008; it has gone in that time from three auditors to one and from three investigators to none.
“If you don’t have enforcement to go along with disclosure,” William Perry of Common Cause Georgia said at the time, “then you don’t have anything at all.”
Meanwhile in Alabama, whose revenue stream is, if anything, more recession-vulnerable than Georgia’s, both houses of the Legislature have passed a bill that constitutionally guarantees funding for its Ethics Commission. (In Alabama, they still call it that.) Gov. Robert Bentley signed the bill into law Monday.
Ethics Commissioner Jim Sumner said the formula will allow his office to continue at its current staffing level, and will help to protect it against the threat (and presumably the reality) of political reprisals by officials who don’t welcome Ethics Commission attention.
“Protecting its budget from political retaliation,” said the bill’s chief House sponsor, Rep. Mike Jones, R-Andalusia, “will help the Ethics Commission be the independent agency it needs to be to keep state and local governments accountable.”
The new Alabama law guarantees the commission one-tenth of 1 percent of the state General Fund budget. That doesn’t make it immune to economic fluctuation, certainly not in Alabama’s consumption-tax-based revenue system, but it does protect the commission’s budget from easy political plunder when the state is in an economic squeeze: The Ethics Commission’s funding can henceforth be cut below that level only by a two-thirds vote of the House and Senate.
That’s not just a good-government measure; it’s also a good-politics measure. Republican legislative candidates have put ethics reform at the top of their political agenda in recent elections, as well they might given the casually tolerated good-ole-boy corruption that had become commonplace after a century of one-party control by Democrats. The Ethics Commission has often been handcuffed -- partly by the possibility of political retaliation, but also by the fact that Alabama ethics law has traditionally been short on constraints and long on wiggle room. If what most reasonable people think of as corruption isn’t even illegal, what’s to enforce?
The new Republican majority has, at least on paper, taken on both problems. Now they have to enforce, and live up to, the higher standards they claim to have set.
