Last week was the week of the ethics melodrama in Hartford. Or was it a farce?
Or maybe a morality play, acted by the cast of “The Office.”
It was pretty funny. But the angels won, this time.
Let’s review: Connecticut has a new Office of State Ethics—to replace the old, moribund, and pathetic Ethics Commission. The latter’s basic modus operandi was to pronounce all things legal that were not indictable and to questions ethics only when the stakes were exceedingly low or the person being questioned had little or no power.
But the Office of State Ethics has been different.
First, it banned legislators from their longtime practice of getting heavily discounted UConn tickets.
Hmmm. Not nice.
And not amusing.
Then, a few days ago, the new watchdog really got gutsy. It issued an opinion that barred House Speaker James Amann from soliciting donations from lobbyists and their clients for the MS Society, which employs him.
Duh. Ya think?
The ethics office found that to be a gross shakedown, since there is only one office Hartford lobbyists seek to influence more than the speaker, and that is the governor.
If the speaker told the average Hartford lobbyist to shoot his dog, his cat, and a random librarian, the lobbyist would do so.
The ethics office also found Amann’s way of doing things—the tone of his solicitations—well, heavy-handed.
To be fair, maybe Amann deserves some credit too—for asking for the ruling and putting his cards on the table. Not many in his shoes have done so, and if everyone at the Capitol with a conflict of interest had to quit the legislature or his outside job, there would be quite a few open seats in the next election. But for every classy thing Amann does, he does three cheesy things, sometimes for no apparent reason.
In any case, an ethics office that takes ethics seriously is a new phenomenon in Hartford. And a bit of a shock. In the past there was occasional scrutiny of the governor and his office. (It had to get pretty blatant.) But legislators? Forget about it. Legislators hold the purse strings.
And they are vengeful.
A few days after the speaker got his wrists slapped there emerged from the General Assembly a proposal to install judicial review of the ethics office.
“What are they afraid of?” asked its sponsor.
And the answer came, from the ethics office and everyone else whose name is not Bo Peep: Being cut off at the knees.
Gosh, you think judges would gut an independent agency dedicated to ethics in state government just to protect the hides of legislators?
Well, put it this way: The only people who are actually more sycophantic toward legislators than lobbyists are judges.
It looked bad for our new heroes.
But two people came to the rescue:
One was Rep. Chris Caruso, who is generally called crazy by Hartford insiders but has more courage than anyone in Hartford. If he ever gets a fatal disease, they will call him a prophet. (In fact, when they start calling him that, check the obits.) Caruso saw this proposal for what it was: A way to sabotage the new agency, laws, and ethos in Hartford in their infancies. And he had the seniority and standing to stop the dirty deal.
The other was Gov. Jodi Rell. The smart people in Hartford call her “Mother Rell” and roll their eyes. She doesn’t get it, you know.
Apparently the one thing worse than being crazy is being maternal. Except that most of us like mothers, our own and most moms we meet, and that’s because a mom can usually be counted on to do the right thing and break up the shenanigans. Moms have authority and common sense. And both scare the jellybeans out of Speaker Amann and the gang that can’t shoot straight.
Said Rell: “We don’t need a watchdog of the watchdog. … Let’s let these people do their jobs.”
That stopped the bullet.
So the office of ethics took on the dubious ethical standard of the old guard at the Capitol and survived.
Amazing.
But if this is the end of this story Sen. Lou DeLuca reads Proust and Tom Ritter has joined a Trappist monastery.
There will undoubtedly be more.
Stay tuned.
Keith C. Burris is editorial page editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.
