Much to the detriment of everyone involved. With the way things turned out, it’s hard to make any precise conclusion, except to say that Rep. Sheryl Allen is right: The Utah Legislature’s system for handling ethics issues is decidedly broken.
Ostensibly, Rep. Hughes was accused of offering a $50,000 bribe to get then Rep. Susan Lawrence to vote in favor of passing the 2007 voucher bill. Considering the horribly ugly abuse of government and the legal system by pro-voucher forces in 2007, it’s totally plausible that such a high-handed bribe could have occurred. After all, every other conceivable strong-arm tactic was tried.
I’ve said it before, but had it not been for the Utah Supreme Court’s injection of sanity into the that acrimonious debate, the lunacy would have continued.
I’m not using the word “lunacy” in reference to the core issue of whether or not vouchers are a good idea — we’ve been robbed of an intelligent debate on the merits of vouchers by their extreme advocates.
But the word applies to their efforts to strong-arm the Legislature, to attempt to circumvent a vote of the people and to continue to manipulate things so that vouchers would prevail even if the voters said no.
I, for one, cannot understand why they would want to so taint the issue in the minds of the public. Again, had the Supreme Court not mandated a straight up-or-down public vote on vouchers, a great injustice would have been done to the political process.
And I’m afraid this current ugly affair has done another injustice to our political system and the people we’ve elected to office.
We’re now being given the following choices:
(1) We can believe the House Ethics Committee's ruling clearing Hughes, which then forces us to conclude that Utah Democrats are nothing but conniving schemers willing to brandish false charges at the last minute just to hijack an election.
(2) We can believe that the Ethics Committee closed ranks around one of its own and let an egregious violation slide just to protect a member of the majority party. This is especially plausible because of the committee’s letter to censure Hughes for his abrasive conduct.
(3) Or we can choose to believe that corruption is rampant, with both parties behaving very badly.
All three conclusions leave a bad taste in our mouths. There doesn’t seem to be a happy ending in sight. The third conclusion is by far the most likely to be adopted by many Utahns because it’s virtually impossible to tell what really went on.
In any case, the public can conclude that Democrats did not handle themselves honorably, and neither did Republicans.
This creates a cynicism in the electorate, which is the most corrosive effect of all. People will simply begin to believe that politics, even here in Utah, is dirty, corrupt and rampant with cronyism.
Considering the many Davis County legislators we know, however, we have our doubts about some but have confidence in most. Over a period of many years, Davis County legislators have taken reasonable positions and acted quite responsibly on the whole.
We are therefore, saddened to see the political process corrupted over the past couple of years to let our political system degenerate into a snake pit.
In our dealings with members of the Davis delegation, that doesn’t seem to be the case, and a whole group of hardworking people may have been sullied in the public’s eyes.
What becomes clear, as noted earlier, is that significant changes must be made in our ethics review process.
Legislators need to feel confident that they can report true ethics violations without fear of reprisal.
They also need the comfort of knowing that the inmates aren’t running the asylum — in other words, an independent body needs to review complaints in private. Then it should announce publicly any decisions to launch a formal investigation, much the way a grand jury works.
When the independent body concludes that a full inquest is warranted, this inquiry should be done in public view, much as any trial.
The founders gave us this pattern. Some form of this needs to be followed to restore public confidence in our political system.
The ethics committee is half Republicans and half Democrats. They could not have voted to exonerate Hughes on all charges without bipartisan agreement.
Now I'm not saying that ethics reform isn't needed. But it seems quite clear that Riesen's allegations were at best unsubstantiated