Is conflict of interest simply a fact of life we’re required to accept in a part-time citizens’ state Legislature?
Is there any solution short of making our legislators full-time state employees and paying them, oh, let’s say $175,000 a year while forbidding other jobs or favors?
Is the only real solution the election of better people, of part-time citizen legislators who would studiously and solemnly avoid improving their personal financial situations by any means that smacked of leveraging their legislative service?
Or should we just let free enterprise prevail for part-time citizen legislators who have real jobs back home? Should we emphasize merely full disclosure for potential political opponents to consider and voters to decide?
These questions sound easy until you apply human circumstances to them, in which case they’re … well, maybe still easy for many of you. And you’re the ones who ought to count.
The Michael Lamoureux matter put all these questions freshly in my mind.
Late last week, Jerry Walsh, the former director of a now-closed provider of services for troubled youth in Magnolia, entered a negotiated guilty plea to a federal conspiracy charge in the improper use of the agency’s money for lobbying and legislative influence.
Among the outlays of agency money cited in the federal filing was $123,750 to “Senator C” from July 2013 to November 2014. Lamoureux was president pro tempore of the Senate during that time, and he — now a lobbyist working with Courtney Goodson’s rich husband John — has not disputed wide reporting that he fits the description of “Senator C.”
Here, then, is the story as I understand it: Walsh’s agency was getting a little occasional unfavorable publicity for incidents with youths and was concerned about continuing to get state money for its services.
Beyond paying convicted lobbyist Rusty Cranford, Walsh went to Lamoureux, big cheese in the Senate, and a private lawyer operating in Russellville. He invited Lamoureux to avail himself of his background as a public defender in juvenile representation to provide lawyer services for the agency.
Lamoureux eventually agreed after taking special pains to say that the agreement had to be strictly lawyer-client and could not dare touch on legislative issues. Walsh said fine, that he needed a lawyer with Lamoureux’s juvenile-law experience.
Lamoureux has told people he never did any legislative favor for Walsh’s agency.
The argument in Lamoureux’s defense is that lawyers should get treated in terms of legislative ethical guidelines the same as any other private-sector provider of services happening to serve in the Arkansas General Assembly. A legislatively interested party hiring a legislator-lawyer for his private services is the same as a legislatively interested party buying a fleet of new company cars from the dealership of a lawyer-legislator, the kind of thing that, word is, has happened over the years.
When Asa Hutchinson took office as governor in January 2015, he needed instant expertise in dealing with the Legislature to have any hope of saving the Medicaid expansion program. For that reason, he made Lamoureux his chief of staff. Lamoureux had dropped the youth services arrangement that November, anticipating his job with the governor in January.
One might ask: Why would Lamoureux maintain even an appearance of a conflict of interest as a legislator but find it advisable to end the arrangement upon going to work for the governor? Was he admitting a personal impropriety as a legislator with which he was unwilling to taint the governor’s office?
Lamoureux has told people it was simple: As a part-time legislator, he had to make a private living. Chief of staff to the governor was a good-paying full-time job.
It wasn’t ethics, but math, in other words.
The federal filing referred to Walsh’s outlays as “pay to play.”
I wonder if that phrase isn’t a tad overheated. It implies Lamoureux told a tax receiver to hire him or else. There’s no evidence that was the case.
What I’ve attempted is to provide a narrative for consideration by the reader, the taxpayer, the voter.
For my part, here’s how I answer those opening questions:
• No, we don’t need full-time legislators. Those guys make a big enough mess part-time.
• Yes, the real solution is better people, and, no, we shouldn’t let free enterprise apply unfettered in our state legislative culture. We need legislators — even part-time, even in need of making a living — who say, no, I’m not going to do that, because it doesn’t smell right, look right or feel right.
Let’s say a lawn-service guy gets elected to the General Assembly. We need working folks in such positions. Let’s say that, all of a sudden, every major lobbyist at the Capitol needs this fellow’s lawn services.
Is the lawn service man-legislator not entitled to grow his business?
Yes, he is entitled to grow his business, just not with those clients.
My best conclusion is that this kind of thing can’t be stopped altogether, but surely needn’t be so common.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.