Second thoughts

Now’s the time to have them

“These are my principles. And if you don’t like them, I have others.”

—Groucho Marx

ETHICS OUGHT to be something more than an issue that candidates can talk about during election season and demagogue after. When ethics become just a political football to toss back and forth—preferably aimed at your opponent’s nose, when he’s least expecting it—the whole idea and ideal of ethics is lost.

Arkansas has an ethics problem, specifically in the legislative branch. Do we have to review the news of the last two years? Five former lawmakers have been convicted, or have pleaded guilty, to federal charges. This ain’t just a public relations problem, or a question of optics. This is real.

The news side of this operation reported in Sunday’s editions that there’s a practice among lawmakers of loaning money back and forth. Friends indeed, etc. But when lawmakers are writing checks to each other, it becomes more than friends helping friends or colleagues bailing out somebody at the next desk. Especially when one of the parties is loaning money to another party who makes committee assignments. Talk about the good-old-boy system, this is about as good-old-boy as it gets.

The new Speaker of the Arkansas House, Matt Shepherd, says he’s thinking about changing the rules or proposing legislation to prohibit this kind of backroom dealing: “I have got to give it some further thought whether it be just an outright ban, whether there is some threshold, some maximum amount, but that’s something that I’m certainly looking at, and I don’t think that going forward that we should have loans among members for significant amounts of money.”

By jove, he’s got it. We’d take it one step further: How about disallowing the practice, regardless of the amount of money?

One lawmaker who made such a loan, innocent that he is, told our own Mike Wickline that he never gave it a second thought. Well, maybe the rest of us should.

If lawmakers don’t pass legislation to restore the public’s (never) strong trust in them, then a ban on these loans should be written into the ethics code. And more’s the pity. For the necessity of an ethics code itself, and all these ethics commissions that go with them, is an indication that our betters, elected to serve us, have lost the original idea of ethics: which is a solemn obligation beyond the law.

But where ethics fail, the law will have to do. Shame, isn’t it?

Also, prepare yourself, Gentle Reader, for the usual naysayers in the Ledge who will doubtless find excuses not to pass anything, in the law or in the ethics code. In the years past, there’s been an anti-ethics bloc in the Arkansas General Assembly, and we’re not sure if those in it have been term-limited out yet. Be aware that said bloc will give us its best efforts, or worst, and find reasons why lawmakers shouldn’t be prohibited from slipping the House speaker a grand or 16. Where there’s no will, there’s no way.

We the People could get their attention, although we may have to be about as subtle as a two-by-four upside the head. Some will learn no other way.