“Almost immediately within arriving in Virginia in early 2012, I began hearing about the ‘Virginia Way’ and ‘Jefferson’s House,’” Baratko said. “Virginia politics are, as I was told, expected to be beyond hyper-partisanship. And corruption or pay-for-play just wasn’t something a high-profile statewide elected official would engage in.” (For context, the following events have occurred in the past year in South Carolina: the lieutenant governor pleaded guilty to multiple counts of public corruption; the governor faced two very public ethics hearings of which she was ultimately cleared, but later paid a fine for improper campaign records; a state senator resigned amid allegations he used campaign funds for purchases at adult superstores and for male enhancement drugs; the attorney general failed to report more than $130,000 in campaign funds; and the state police are currently investigating the House Speaker for using his public office for personal gain, though he denies wrongdoing.)
A push for less transparency?
But in the wake of the McDonnell scandal, “The Virginia Way” might be up for reconsideration. A Washington Post interactive published last weekend tracks $3.1 million in personal gifts to elected officials over the past decade—and that’s just what was disclosed.
“As conflicts between the federal executive and legislative branches have recently demonstrated, crisis is an increasingly necessary impetus for change in our country,” Geoff Skelley, a staffer at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, told me recently. “Perhaps this crisis over improper gifts will incite Virginia’s government to make needed alterations to the state’s ethics laws.”
Such hopes are laced with irony, though. The jailed legislator Megan Rhyne referred to above was Phil Hamilton, an influential Republican delegate from Newport News. In 2009, when McDonnell was running for governor, Hamilton was being investigated by a federal grand jury for soliciting a job with a university where he’d helped steer $500,000 in state funds.
At the peak of Hamilton’s scandal, candidate McDonnell capitalized on it, proposing the creation of a statewide ethics commission. But as BuzzFeed’s Andrew Kaczynski pointed out in a recent piece, that plan never came to fruition after the governor was elected.
In writing about the state’s lax laws in April, the Post’s Vozzella reported that the Hamilton scandal had “inspired a flurry of bills intended to strengthen ethics rules, but very few passed.” Among the killed legislation was a measure “that would have banned gifts worth more than $100. No changes were made to the state’s campaign contribution laws, which allow unlimited donations as long as they are disclosed.” In 2010, this headline appeared in the Post: “Virginia General Assembly goes slow on tough ethics reform.”
And despite recent calls for stricter rules, Virginia lawmakers had actually been tacking in the opposite direction before the McDonnell scandal broke, according to one recent report. In a July 14 piece, Associated Press political writer Bob Lewis wrote:
Transparency didn’t seem much of a concern in January and February. That’s when lawmakers exempted emails written and sent on state accounts by themselves and their staffs from the state’s Freedom of Information Act.
They also exempted some records regarding disaster preparedness and exempted a new Nuclear Energy Consortium Authority from FOIA’s provisions.
Every year, Virginia’s elected representatives try—and usually succeed—in cloaking more information about what they do and how government does the public’s business from the people who elected them.
The Coalition for Open Government’s Rhyne, discussing that article, says the actual change was fairly small: the exemption has actually been on the books for about a dozen years, and the recent movement on it merely clarified that the carve-out also applied to aides when they are speaking on a lawmaker’s behalf.
Regardless, it makes for less transparency in Virginia, not more. And it’s especially striking because the Post’s latest scoop this week—the first to show McDonnell personally intervening on behalf of Williams and Star Scientific—was based on emails obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.
The reporting agenda ahead
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