An EC Reports on a Legislator Who Resigned His Way Out of Its Jurisdiction

Here's another blog post about a Georgian who wants out of EC jurisdiction.

Some ethics commissions, especially state ethics commissions, have no jurisdiction over officials once they leave office. Especially when ECs require confidentiality regarding complaints until probable cause is found, this lack of jurisdiction allows officials to resign before their unethical conduct becomes public. And it allows officials to evade enforcement.

The Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) bravely did something about this problem, and by doing so asserted its independence from the House Ethics Committee. Despite the fact that Nathan Deal resigned from Congress "before a deadline that would have required the House ethics committee to investigate the accusations further or dismiss the case," according to an article in yesterday's Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the OCE issued its report anyway.

Deal clearly intended to prevent the report from going public, because he is running for governor of Georgia. But the OCE, a bipartisan committee of three Democrats and three Republicans, none of them currently in Congress, voted 6-0 to make the report public. It acted pursuant to "House Resolution 895 of the 110th Congress § 1(f)(1)(B) (2008), which provides that the Board may release 'any communication' pursuant to its rules or as 'necessary to conduct official business.'" This quote is from the OCE's site, the page containing the link to the 128-page report.

In other words, the OCE employed an interpretation of an ambiguous provision to do what Congress probably did not intend it to do:  report on representatives who are more interested in protecting their reputation than being held accountable when they've used their position to help themselves and their families.

ECs shouldn't have to do this. No government official should be able to resign his way out of ethics enforcement. Any misconduct that merits resignation is by definition very serious.

One passage from the report (p. 15) has nothing to do with unethical conduct, but will bring a smile to your face:

Representative Deal’s Chief of Staff attended all three meetings with the Department of Revenue. When asked why he would attend the meetings, the Chief of Staff stated that he rarely allows Representative Deal to go anywhere without him, unless it is a family matter.

Robert Wechsler
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics

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