When he was a full-time Times Union columnist I often found Fred LeBrun dull, but he's blossoming in semi-retirement and yesterday's corker about the yet-to-be appointed Joint Commission on Public Ethics was on the money. Gov. Andrew Cuomo has not yet announced any appointments, and legislative leaders have not announced their nominees. The governor, says LeBrun, "may be the public's darling at the moment, but by nature, he is a micromanager who plays it very close to the vest and insists on absolute loyalty from those around him. Why would we think that his expectations would be any less for those he appoints to the new ethics commission? Believe it or not, there may come a time when Cuomo himself could be on the ethical hot seat. Then what? Another sham?"
That last is a reference to a prior governor, Eliot Spitzer, who got the Legislature to pass a disastrous ethics "reform" which created a Commission on Public Integrity (now abolished under Cuomo). In that reform, LeBrun writes, "Spitzer insisted on appointing the majority of its commissioners, solidifying the perception that it was his. And it was his, inside and out. When the commission was forced to look at that governor's own ethical behavior, as in Troopergate, the result was unsurprisingly a sham."
LeBrun also quotes former Lobbying Commission director David Grandeau, a favorite of journalists because, unlike almost every other ethics board member and enforcer in town, he has been willing to speak the truth and not protect the interests of whoever appointed him. Ethics board members tend to be politically connected lawyers, and act as if the people who appointed them are their clients. Grandeau exposed actions taken by his political godfather, Joe Bruno, that eventually resulted in Bruno's criminal conviction. No wonder the pols combined against Grandeau and, through Spitzer's law, forced him out of office.
Cuomo's new law, at Senate Republican insistence, has protections against political railroading. The Senate's position reflected what a lot of politicians think, which is that an investigator can always find a reason to go after anyone, like a grand jury indicting a ham sandwich (as Sol Wachtler put it). There's something to that, but the larger danger is continuation of Albany politics and corruption as usual.
But now, LeBrun says, "finding commissioners who meet the stringent guidelines won't be easy. It's a thankless enough job to begin with, but anyone who was a registered lobbyist in the past three years or has been or is a state legislator, party chairman, state officer or state employee is ineligible." You also as I recall, can't be a political independent. That makes me eligible, as I recently signed up as a Republican, and have long experience writing about this topic on this blog and previously for newspapers. So gimme a call, guv, or Sen. Skelos, or whoever. The unlikelihood of that happening, of anyone not in the loyalist insider 0.1 percent getting the nod, speaks to the problem.
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