By John Brummett

Moses came down from the mountain with these tablets from God listing the Ten Things You Must Disclose.

So you’re required to disclose it publicly if you covet your neighbor’s wife. That’s so that people — your neighbor and his wife, to mention two — can have knowledge of what you’ve done so they can make whatever decisions they deem appropriate.

You’re required to disclose publicly that you’ve borne false witness, meaning lied. That’s so people can make whatever adjustments they determine to be necessary in their thinking about you or in their thinking about that thing you lied about.

You’re saying wait a minute. You’re saying these were not Ten Things You Must Disclose. You’re saying these were the Ten Commandments. You’re saying God didn’t tell us through Moses to kill and steal and then disclose. You’re saying God commanded us not to do those things in the first place.

Well, OK, if you want to get technical and biblical. I was merely being legislative, as in the Arkansas Legislature, where the essence of the so-called ethics laws is to do pretty much whatever you want, but disclose it under legal requirement so that people  — if they have the time and wherewithal to check records, which most people don’t — can get upset and vote against you if they want.

We had a comic interlude in regard to all this the other day.

The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette went through legally required financial disclosure forms filed by legislators and found some of them listing certain payments in their behalf to travel to, and attend, conferences. The paper was aware of other legislators who were said to have taken these same trips, but who had not listed them on their disclosure forms. So it wrote a story taking to task those not listing these trips on their forms.

Rep. Joan Cash of Jonesboro hadn’t reported that an institute paid to send her, as well as other legislators, to Turkey. She hadn’t reported that the Arkansas Electric Cooperatives Inc., had paid for her trip, and that of other legislators, to a conference in Washington on rural electrification. Sen. Hank Wilkins of Pine Bluff hadn’t reported that Microscoft and a wireless company had covered him in amounts totaling $3,200 for trips to Seattle and San Francisco.

That is to say the headline-grabbing failure was not disclosing.

Actually, though, the real failure — and the misdeed that legislators ought to have more decency than to commit, and which ought to be expressly forbidden in the sad event they don’t — is getting lavished with nice trips by special interests in the first place.

Is there any chance our Legislature might toughen this law to prohibit our elected representatives from getting feted by special interests who, for one example, want to build coal-fired electric generating plants in our jurisdiction?

Probably not. Just last week a state Senate committee declined to give a favorable recommendation to a bill saying legislators couldn’t become lobbyists within a year of the end of their legislative terms.

Why, this could work a financial hardship on a departing legislator.

And we still have that law saying legislators may take what they wish from lobbyists so long as no single expenditure exceeds $100 in value and so long as it’s — you guessed it — disclosed. And, naturally, the gift ban exempts getting flown to Seattle or Washington or San Francisco to attend a conference.

It’s not wrong in our book if you go. It’s just wrong if you don’t put it down on some required form. We don’t regulate ethics. We regulate paperwork. We’d have told Moses to forget his stone tablet and set up a filing system.
——-
John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699.