Editorial: Harrell indictment should motivate ethics reform

IT’S TEMPTING to say that Bobby Harrell’s criminal indictment on nine corruption counts demonstrates that our ethics law works just fine.

A conviction would mean, in much the same way as it did with Ken Ard and Mark Sanford and Robert Ford and Jake Knotts, that the law was violated, and the violator was punished.

But the fact is that there have been a lot more hoops to jump through than should have been necessary.

The fact is that in all of these cases, and the handful of others involving statewide and legislative officials, the misconduct wasn’t caught until well after the fact — and often serendipitously.

The fact is that the way these cases have been treated strongly suggests that other elected officials have done similar things, and just haven’t been caught.

The fact is that the primary goal of any law is to stop crimes from occurring, and a secondary goal is to catch people early in the crime-committing process, before the crimes escalate. And our law clearly fails to meet those goals.

Most of the hoops in the Harrell case derived from a state law that gives primary enforcement of legislators’ ethics compliance to legislators. Even though the state constitution clearly empowers the attorney general to pursue any criminal cases he sees fit, the self-policing law created an opening for Mr. Harrell to waste months of the courts’ and prosecutors’ time pursuing groundless allegations that the attorney general was out to get him, or even lacked jurisdiction.

State law allows the House and Senate Ethics committees to initiate complaints on their own, yet there is nothing to indicate that the House panel looked into how Mr. Harrell was using campaign money in the two years since it became a political issue, or the years before that. Even if we discount the tremendous reluctance legislators might have to investigate someone so powerful, there remains this problem: Neither committee has the staff or investigative tools to pursue anything beyond the most obvious of violations.

The Harrell indictment didn’t uncover new flaws in the law; it simply reminded us in a dramatic way of the reforms we need.

We need an independent entity to review legislators’ ethics compliance. It needs the staff and tools to review disclosure reports and spot potential violations. And it needs the mandate to turn potentially criminal cases over to prosecutors, before it bungles the investigation.

Penalties need to be high enough to deter bad behavior. That means not just higher fines or even prison time but also the loss of office for people who refuse to file disclosure reports or pay their fines.

And we must not lose sight of the other needed reforms: requiring legislators and other public officials to tell us where their income is coming from; closing long-recognized loopholes in our campaign finance law; and making dozens of smaller changes that somehow keep getting lost in the mix.

Mr. Harrell’s indictment should reinvigorate efforts in the coming session to push through all of these reforms that the Legislature has been toying with for two years. If not now, when?

This story was originally published September 27, 2014 at 9:00 PM with the headline "Editorial: Harrell indictment should motivate ethics reform."