Lawyers for Governor and Mrs. McDonnell are spending this rainy Richmond day doing what no one could have imagined a few months ago: pleading with the federal government not to indict the couple on corruption charges.
Regardless of what one thinks of the McDonnells, this is a sad turn of events. But today’s events also beg a question: should they be indicted? And if they are, will any jury buy the prosecutors’ arguments?
The McDonnells have, apparently, broken no laws even as they exhibited astonishingly poor judgement.
But social faux pas and nit-wittery are not federal offenses. Unless the feds know much more than has been reported (or rather, leaked) in the papers, then there just doesn’t seem to be much of a case here.
This does not mean there isn’t a very big problem here in River City. The gift culture is rampant. Look down the list of gifts given to elected officials over the years. Trips, dinners, trinkets. Not a one of these gifts would have been given had the recipient not been an elected official. None of it is illegal. All of it is tawdry.
For a while now, the editors have been calling for the General Assembly to call a special session, to be held before the election, that would bring this honest graft to an end.
The arguments against such a move are many. The worthies need time to propose sensible changes. Moving too quickly could mean chaos or worse, the passage of new rules that actually bite.
The simple fact is that outside of a very few, including Ken Cuccinelli, no one in power wants to see the state’s ethics rules change in an appreciable way. The longer any changes can be put off, the more likely the public will forget there was a problem in the first place. No public pressure means little or, much better, no change.
I still hold the position that the rules have to be changed now — before the election. Elected officials have a duty to their constituents to lay out in open session how they intend to clean up the place. Doing so before the election would give voters a clear picture of who stands for reform, and who is in this for the booty.
A special session is very unlikely to happen. The Republican ticket is split on the issue and Democrats are following Terry McAuliffe’s lead that the whole thing is “a gimmick.”
As sad as it is to read of a sitting governor pleading with prosecutors, it is not as bad as the much uglier spectacle of a political class unified in its opposition to immediately eliminating one of the sources of corruption. Tighten the ethics rules now? Ban gifts? That could lead to electoral unpleasantness. Not to mention spoiling Christmas.
Good.
Call the special session Do it now.
