Liberty and Justice for All!

Today Bobby Jindal said of his ethics session:

“This was a grand slam. This was a home run. This was complete victory,” 

However at the beginning of the ethics session he stated that he wanted to “bat a thousand”.  As we all know, when it came to several of the ethics proposals suggested in the special session, he struck out.

Jindal balked at true ethics reform, looking to only solve the “perception of ethical problems” when he could have went after actually fixing ethical problems. Legislators agree. More from the article:

The session “had nothing to do with Louisiana and our people. It was to satisfy people from the outside,” said Rep. Patrick Williams, D-Shreveport.

“Hopefully, I think we finally put this perception of corruption in Louisiana to rest,” said Rep. Cedric Richmond, D-New Orleans. “This is all about perception and rankings. That’s what this session was about. You can’t legislate honesty or morality.”

And while you cannot legislate honesty or morality, you can make tougher penalties for those who act in a dishonest or immoral way. However, I see no extra funding for the ethics board, only a weakening of it. Instead of the ethics board deciding who is wrong, it is an appointee of the Governor.

Jindal tried to throw us curve balls, by demanding more transparency on just the legislature and then crying foul when the legislature asked for more transparency from him.

And it seems the rain delay for some change will last until 2012.

Paraphrasing a caller to 99.5 this afternoon, when Jindal’s ethics session is placed in the record books, there will be a large asterisk beside it.

Edited to add: Bobby Jindal says that this is “complete victory”. Does that mean Jindal feels no more ethics legislation is needed?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 26th, 2008 at 11:04 pm and is filed under ethics, Bobby Jindal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.