I initially missed this release when it came in yesterday.
Back during the recent election, some in the blogosphere tried to paint John Courson as ethically challenged, citing an instance of alleged nepotism.
It seems that the watchdog group Common Cause doesn’t agree with that assessment:
Common Cause Award Presented to Senator John CoursonColumbia, SC – February 22, 2013 – President Pro Tempore John Courson was yesterday presented with an award from Common Cause for “Outstanding Career Leadership in Promoting Ethics Reform in the SC Senate.”The prestigious award was given to Senator Courson by John Crangle, Director of the SC Chapter of Common Cause, Kenneth W. Gaines, State Chairman of Common Cause, and former Congressman Bob Edgar, President and CEO of Common Cause.“I am tremendously honored to receive this recognition of my longtime support of ethics reform in South Carolina,” Senator Courson said.Common Cause is a nonpartisan, nonprofit advocacy organization founded in 1970 by John Gardner as a vehicle for citizens to make their voices heard in the political process and to hold their elected leaders accountable to the public interest.To view photo, click here.###
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Sen. Wes Hayes is primary sponsor of the current Senate bills on ethics reform, for which Sen. Courson is a co-sponsor. Their bills would fix many of the problems having to do with campaign finance disclosure and the candidate filing process and would improve the process of investigating and disciplining ethics violations. The greatest area of concern that remains is that of personal financial disclosure requirements and conflicts of interest. This is an area in which little things matter a lot, in this case a single definition.
S. 338 as written requires disclosure of “all income,” which sounds great. However, as Cindi Scoppe at The State has observed more than once, the SC Ethics Commission definition of “income” is bizarre, limited only to salary and wages. Those forms of income aren’t where many of the real problems resulting in conflict of interest are. It is in “consulting fees” and similar arrangements, whether paid directly to officials or to the companies that pay them, that we find many of the real problems. As now written, S.338 doesn’t fix the definition of income. Therefore, significant conflicts of interest might not be disclosed. It is unlikely that the General Assembly will go back and fix this problem in the next several years, after wading through reform efforts this year. This definition needs to be fixed now, or some of the problems that have been of greatest concern in the past several years will still be beyond the reach of the law.
How about we make it a requirement that any elected official in the stat must disclose his/her SC tax return every year? That would seem to be a reasonable expectation.
” “Outstanding Career Leadership in Promoting Ethics Reform in the SC Senate.”
So Senator Courson has been successful in making the SC Senate more ethical? More being a relative term, apparently. How far along the path to an actual ethical Senate are we? 10%? 25%? 100%? I guess I’d start handing out awards when there were results to prove it.
From the same Senator who proudly keeps telling everyone he was a Marine… but likely never saw action beyond boot camp at Paris Island. A Vietnam war hero who’s reserve unit never left South Carolina. So much for his ethical recommendations.
More is exactly a relative term. Duh!
@Kathryn
So how much more ethical is the SC Senate as a result of Senator Courson’s OUTSTANDING work?
Since being ethical is an either/or quality, I would expect that 100% of the Senate is 100% ethical. I
Why is ethical a binary quality?