The Brief: Ethics Regulators Unhappy With 2015 Session

by Polo Rocha

 

The Big Conversation

One message clearly stood out from Thursday’s Texas Ethics Commission meeting: Some of its members are not happy. 

 

By the close of the legislative session, many reformers were disappointed at what they believed to be a failure by lawmakers to enact significant ethics reforms — which Gov. Greg Abbott had called for. And, as the Tribune’s Jim Malewitz points out, some ethics commissioners say lawmakers actually went backward on ethics this session:

 

“There are some bills on the governor’s desk that just scare me to death,” Commissioner Jim Clancy, the body’s former chairman, said at the meeting.

 

The bipartisan commissioners largely focused on Thursday on measures awaiting Abbott’s signature that would open up a “spousal loophole” allowing politicians to shield information about their spouses’ financial holdings.

 

The proposals would essentially repeal an agency rule, drafted last year in the wake of ethics violations by a former House member, that spells out what must be included in personal financial statements filed by the governor, members of the Legislature and other high-ranking state officials – including certain information about their spouses’ property and financial activity.

 

“There needs to be the designation of potential conflicts of interest,” Clancy said in an interview. “It doesn’t make a difference as far as the public is concerned whether a business takes the spouse of a government official to the Super Bowl and lets the government official come along, or whether they take the government official to the Super Bowl.”

 

Acting in their personal, not official, capacity, Clancy and three other commissioners asked the governor in a letter to veto the two bills. The lawmaker who pushed the changes, Sen. Joan Huffman, said the agency’s rule was unclear, which Clancy disputed. A Katy resident has also filed a complaint against Huffman, alleging that she violated the rule.

 

Also at Thursday’s meeting, commissioners unanimously decided they want subpoenas enforced against Michael Quinn Sullivan, the president of conservative advocacy group Empower Texans, and they’re asking a court for help.

 

The San Antonio Express-News’ David Saleh Rauf explains the commission’s request to the Travis County district court.

 

It marks the first time the state’s campaign finance regulator has initiated action to seek a court to compel response to a subpoena, commission officials said.

 

Sullivan, an anti-tax and limited government activist, has fought for more than a year to have the subpoenas quashed — first in federal court, where a judge called them absurd but refused to nullify the document demand and later in a Travis County district court, which has not ruled on the issue.

 

The commission is seeking a lengthy list of documents, including Sullivan’s communication with donors and lawmakers. After several rounds of negotiations, the scope of the subpoenas were altered, but Sullivan’s lawyers have argued they were still overly broad.

 

Sullivan’s lawyer, Joe Nixon, said the commissioner’s claims that Sullivan has hidden information from commissioners “couldn’t be further from the truth.” 

 Polo Rocha is a reporter for the Texas Tribune where this story originally published and reprinted here through a news partnership between the Texas Tribune and Corridor News.