New Mexicans voted Nov. 6 overwhelmingly (75 percent) in favor of Constitutional Amendment 2, establishing an ethics commission to oversee the foxes in the hen house aka the Roundhouse. That message can’t get much clearer for those representing us in the state legislature.
A 75 percent affirmation loudly states several things to legislators:
• we don’t trust you;
• we don’t trust you overseeing yourselves;
• we want to know that when an ethical violation occurs, someone holds you accountable, other than your buddy sitting two chairs away.
Yet there are legislators in positions of House or Senate control who did not receive the message. Either that or they’re too thin-skinned to have fingers pointed at them.
One of the most honest, dedicated and well-meaning representatives to enter the house in a very long time pushed this constitutional amendment through. Former Rep. Jim Dines, R-Bernalillo had been in the House a couple of minutes when he began work creating an ethics commission.
He met much push back, complaints and uncooperative representatives and senators of all parties. Legislators do not like to be watched, questioned or have their campaign contributions scrutinized. Dines doesn’t have that problem because he doesn’t take any amount of money or goods from anyone. That’s an absolute with him.
It is quite unfortunate for all New Mexicans, not just those in Bernalillo County that Dines lost his bid for re-election in the Republican/Trump revolution of the mid-term elections. The Democratic party threw a ton of money into the race and Democrat Abbas Akhil beat Dines by 115 votes, 50.49 percent to 49.51 percent.
We don’t know if Akhil has Dines’ ethics and dedication. But he’ll surely not have Dines’ passion for the ethics commission, or for open government. Neither do most of the leaders in the legislature.
Dines is serving through the end of his term, leaving office Dec. 31. He heads the working ethics commission work group, which is hashing out the details before presenting its recommendations to the full legislature in the upcoming session.
The disagreements over the formation, executive positions and powers of the Ethics Commission are at the root of most disagreements. Like all commissions and boards, democrats want more than republicans and vice-versa. Both the House and Senate want certain things to protect themselves.
The governor’s appointee is supposed to be president but some are calling for election of a president and vice president from within the Commission.
Others want to limit the power of the Commission. Some want absolute power, others want it similar to other complaint boards in state government.
The biggest obstacle will be transparency. Legislators claim there will be a torrential downpour of meaningless, baseless complaints that will libel their good names and make re-election difficult. One of the uphill battles in proving libel is demonstrating you have a reputation to lose. We would argue many legislators would face a sisyphean task there.
Our most recent experience with complaints against State Police is that some of the complaints are petty, such as, he was rude. Others are cause for concern, such as, he passed me doing at least 90 with no lights on.
In one patrolman’s case, there were about five very similar complaints. He resigned after the fourth complaint.
No one’s good name was damaged. A reasonable person knows when a complaint is whining and when there is real cause for concern.
Our state legislators need to get over their false sense of superiority. They need special exceptions for meetings, records releases and even fought having hearings aired. Once it was forced on them, no one died. No one got hurt.
Their big fear that they would say something stupid and it would end up in an opponent’s ad proved to be the weak argument everyone thought it was.
The Ethics Commission suffers the same lame rhetoric. However, without transparency and the public’s ability to see the complaints, we’ll never know how well the Commission is or isn’t addressing real and imagined concerns.
We know Dines will fight for openness. That is almost his raison d’être. However, once he’s gone who can we count on to represent the 75 percent of voters who yearn for transparency and accountability from those who we’ve sent to represent us?
We know the 25 percent who voted no are well-represented already. There’s something terribly wrong when a large majority of legislators represent a small minority of the voting public on this issue. Democracy isn’t supposed to work that way.