So as the gift scandal has unfolded, the coverage has given readers a solid sense of how toothless Virginia’s ethics laws are, and how McDonnell has exploited them. But as an outside observer reading the coverage, I hadn’t been able to get a clear understanding of what exactly it is about the commonwealth that has allowed for such weak oversight and regulation. (Virginia is one of only a handful of states without a statewide ethics commission and one of even fewer in which campaign contributions are not capped, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.)
Recently, I caught up with Day of The Virginian-Pilot to talk about his April piece and the broader set of issues. The current state of affairs, he told me, largely has to do with attitude. In Richmond, Day says, the mindset is that the legislature is a genteel chamber where lawmakers conduct themselves above board, and therefore there is little reason to spend much time hashing out new ethics rules. And while reform proposals might sometimes get discussed, he says—as they were after a different scandal a few years ago—they’re rarely followed through with legislation.
There’s a general belief, Day adds, “that this kind of stuff doesn’t happen here; that these restrictive laws have not been necessary here because we don’t do business that way.” It’s a story Virginia’s political elite tells about itself, and it was invoked by Ken Cuccinelli, the attorney general and Republican gubernatorial candidate who faces questions about his own failure to disclose ties to Williams, as he tried to distance himself from the McDonnell situation during a campaign stop: “What we’ve all been seeing is very painful for Virginia, and it’s completely inconsistent with Virginia’s very reserved traditions.”
Megan Rhyne, director of the Williamsburg-based Virginia Coalition for Open Government, shared a similar assessment.
“If you go back through the years, there has been very little high-level corruption in Virginia,” she said. The McDonnell gift scandal marks the first time in the state’s history that a sitting governor has even been investigated, Rhyne added. That’s despite Virginia having had more governors than any other state in the nation.
“Only one state-level legislator has gone to jail for corruption in my recent memory of 15 or so years,” Rhyne added. “So, Virginia legislators truly believe on some level that their tradition of clean government—The Virginia Way—obviates the need to impose strict laws. That belief may be naive, and while it may apply to the people in office now”—or may not!—“it does nothing to protect against unscrupulous, unethical legislators who may be elected in the future.”
In other talks I’ve had with sources in Virginia, I’ve gotten a sense that the idea lawmakers could be corrupted by influence, gifts, or otherwise is just, well, offensive. Not that it shouldn’t be, obviously, but compared to states like, say, New York or South Carolina, where allegations of politicians disgracing themselves may be met with eyerolls, the commonwealth appears a much milder place.
For someone relatively new to the Virginia political beat, it can be a bit of an eye-opener.
Take Loudoun Times-Mirror reporter Trevor Baratko, who came to Virginia to cover politics last year from the rough-and-tumble political culture of South Carolina. The atmosphere in Richmond is completely different from that of his last job, he told me.
If this were a Republican administration conducting a criminal investigation of one of its potential rivals and leaking heavily to the press, the Post would be screaming "Watergate." It's interesting to see that when the sides are switched, the Post lines up in service to power.
#1 Posted by Tom T., CJR on Fri 19 Jul 2013 at 08:47 AM