Sustain veto to keep ethics law enforceable

GOV. MARK SANFORD has given legislators a chance to salvage their ethics and law enforcement credentials. They should set aside their feelings about him, ignore the cheap shot he took at them in his veto message and seize the opportunity.

We start by acknowledging that the governor’s veto message pulled in so many other rants that it read more like a continuation of his election-year broadside against the Legislature than an attempt to explain his appropriate governmental decision to reject a bad law.

Mr. Sanford went over the line when he suggested that legislators were trying to protect themselves when they voted to cap the fines that elected officials, candidates and some public employees can rack up when they refuse to file public disclosure reports about campaign donations and expenditures and other potential conflicts of interest. It’s true that legislators could potentially benefit from the cap — if they start ignoring the law. But contrary to what the governor would have the public believe, legislators aren’t the ones who are refusing to obey the law and then letting the fines mount to five- and even six-figure amounts rather than complying.

Legislators are, however, the ones who decide what the law will be and whether our state will enforce it. And the governor is absolutely right when he says the bill he vetoed is likely to encourage more people to ignore the disclosure requirements.

Many legislators supported the bill in good faith, after the State Ethics Commission complained that it couldn’t enforce the 2003 law that eliminated the old $600 cap on fines and imposed an aggressive new compliance system that increases fines daily until the reports are filed. But this is one of those cases in which legislators needed to step back and think about how the goals of an enforcement agency differ from the goals of good policy.

Unfortunately, the Ethics Commission became so blinded by the mounting debts of a tiny minority of people who refuse to obey the law that it couldn’t see how well unlimited fines have worked. With the total amount of outstanding fines topping $1 million, the commission and the Legislature concluded that the only way to clear up the problem was to cap the fines and forgive the old debts.

What they overlooked was the fact that those fines are owed by just 147 of the more than 13,000 people who are required to file quarterly or annual disclosure reports. The other 12,850 or so are obeying the law — an astounding rate of compliance.

If a change has to be made to help the Ethics Commission feel better about its balance sheet, there’s a much more limited alternative that will take care of the problem without throwing out a perfectly good law that is doing such an amazingly good job. While we don’t like the idea of reducing or eliminating penalties just because some people refuse to obey the law, we can see forgiving the old penalties and letting those 147 people file their reports and start with a clean slate.

Legislators will have to wait until January to do that, But that’s a small inconvenience compared to the major mistake of overriding Mr. Sanford’s veto and allowing this law to go into effect.