There aren’t as many lawyers in state legislatures these days as there were in the first two-thirds of the 20th Century when the late J. Oliver Emmerich Sr. was writing editorials, and the ethical restrictions on attorneys who held part-time jobs as Mississippi lawmakers weren’t as restrictive as they are now.
Emmerich, the editor and publisher of The Enterprise-Journal in McComb, who died a year before the Mississippi Ethics Commission was established in 1979, took a dim view of lawyers in the Legislature pushing legislation beneficial to their clients.
A rhetorical question he repeated in editorials on the subject was: “When does a legal fee become a bribe?”
The same question could be put another way now: “When does a campaign contribution become a bribe?”
Any impartial observer of Mississippi politics who has even a cursory knowledge of the massive amounts of campaign contributions to state lawmakers and certain statewide officials should be suspicious of what’s going on in state government.
But some recent in-depth articles in The Clarion-Ledger by Geoff Pender, Mollie Bryant and Kate Royals are a reminder of how campaign contributions are being used by legislators and others to take care of personal expenses.
“For many politicians, campaign funds have become personal expense accounts or a second income — potentially tax free,” one of the articles noted. “The spending is largely paid for by lobbyists and special interests doing business with state government.”
It goes on to note that campaign funds are shielded from taxes, ethics and other laws because they are ostensibly to be used for campaigning. But a lot more is being given to many of the politicians than they need to campaign so they are stretching the limits on what the funds should be used for to apply them to personal expenses.
One of the articles notes that the state attorney general, state auditor and secretary of state are the officials who are responsible for investigating whether officials are properly using and reporting campaign money and contributions. But an examination of their campaign financing reports, particularly those of Attorney General Jim Hood and State Auditor Stacey Pickering, raises the same questions. “No one appears to be riding herd on Mississippi campaign finances,” the reporters wrote.
During last year’s statewide campaign, opponents of both Hood, a Democrat, and Pickering, a Republican, raised questions about how they were spending campaign funds, but it didn’t do any good for their opponents. Both Hood and Pickering won re-election.
Another article revealed that “state officials in Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico and New York have gone to jail or are facing criminal indictment for spending campaign funds for their own benefit — something some of their counterparts in Mississippi do routinely” because Mississippi’s campaign finance laws lack safeguards that most states have.
If the political leaders of the state were as zealous as they claim to be in looking out for the taxpayers, they would enact some reforms. But too many of them are enjoying the benefits.
