Legislature unable to police itself on ethics issues

As I listened this week to hours of taped testimony of last fall's House Ethics Committee investigation into charges against Rep. Greg Hughes, R-Draper, one thing became quite clear:

The Utah Legislature can't police itself on ethics matters. It just won't work, no matter how well-intentioned members of the Ethics Committee may be.

And it appeared, to my reading of the tapes, that some GOP members of the committee (all four have since been replaced by new House leadership) were not that well-intentioned to begin with.

Several of the GOP members of the old Ethics Committee seemed to have their own agenda — showing in their questioning that those who brought the complaint should have made a greater effort to let GOP House leaders deal with Hughes' actions, were trying to defeat Hughes in his re-election, and shouldn't have even brought the complaint unless the complainants themselves believed that Hughes would be found guilty by the Ethics Committee itself.

Hughes was cleared of all charges, although on several of the most serious complaints the Ethics Committee vote was 4-4, split along party lines.

It was also clear to me from listening to the tapes that committee members didn't always have a grasp of what they were supposed to ask the witnesses, even of the scope of their investigation.

Members kept wandering off into questions that had nothing to do with the facts alleged in the complaints — looking for personal motives of those who brought the complaint and so on.

In short, the whole ethics complaint process that took place behind closed doors seemed kind of a mess, the tapes tell me.

At one point, Rep. Steve Clark, R-Provo, a committee member, asked Rep. Paul Ray, R-Clearfield, which "representative" of Parents for Choice in Education had offered to pay Ray a "substantial" sum of campaign cash if Ray would switch his vote on private school vouchers. Seemed like a pretty important question to me.

Ray declined to answer, saying he was there only to talk about Hughes, and Hughes never made that offer to him.

But after talking with committee counsel, Chairman Todd Kiser, R-Sandy, said such a question was outside the scope of the committee. So Ray didn't name the person.

I asked Ray this week if he would name that person, and he again declined, saying it was a private conversation, his word against the lobbyist's word, and he didn't want to get into that.