IN CASE YOU MISSED IT ...

KEEP JUDGES OFF PANEL

Editorial, Asbury Park Press, May 25, 2007

A bill approved by an Assembly committee this week would prohibit lawmakers from serving on the Joint Legislative Committee on Ethical Standards. That's a good start. But the bill, pushed by Assembly Speaker Joseph J. Roberts Jr., D-Camden, restricts membership to retired judges and prosecutors. It should keep them off the ethics panel as well.

We prefer a bill sponsored by Assembly Minority Leader Alex DeCroce, R-Morris, that would create an eight-member panel consisting entirely of public members. An ethics committee will not be effective unless its members are free of partisan loyalties. That's why judges and prosecutors should be barred from serving: Many of them are politically connected.

"It's clear the ethics committee's been broken," Roberts said Monday. "It's time to fix it." He's got that part right. The current 16-member panel - eight lawmakers and eight public members — has done nothing but find excuses to dismiss complaints. If a new panel is formed, its first order of business should be to review every complaint dismissed since the panel convened Oct. 23, its first meeting in 17 months.

The committee is a laughingstock. Its members spent four hours at the October meeting debating who should be chairman. The person they finally settled on bailed out three months later after landing a sinecure at Rutgers University. They also debated whether they had jurisdiction over lawmakers steering money to entities for whom they or their spouses work. After concluding they did, they dismissed nearly every complaint.

At a meeting earlier this month, a retired state senator and judge, called by one panel member the "poster boy" for damaging the Legislature's reputation, fell two votes shy of becoming the next chairman. The lunacy of that meeting prompted Roberts to call for change. Yes, change is badly needed. But only if it results in an ethics panel unencumbered by political ties. 

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