January 19, 2009 08:16 PM UTC

Ethics Rules? What Ethics Rules?

•  
• by: Colorado Pols

On the one hand, you’ve got to feel for lobbyist and enforcer supporter of Rep. Dave “Check Out My Resumé” Balmer’s now-infamous bid for House Majority Leader, Eric Groves. You can almost sympathize with the case he made testifying before the ethics panel Friday: he was just doing the same job he does every day at the Capitol (‘suggesting’ to legislators how to vote while ‘coincidentally’ handing checks to those same legislators), how was he supposed to know that leadership elections were not handled the same way?

You’re right–it doesn’t really inspire much sympathy. From Politics West:

“I wasn’t operating thinking I was violating any rule,” Groves said Friday before the joint legislative committee investigating whether he should be disciplined. “… I thought leadership was like any other vote here at the Capitol. I thought you could express your views on it.”

…freshman Rep. Cindy Acree, R-Aurora, said she received a call from two chiropractors and from Groves mentioning checks they needed to give her from a fund-raiser and also asking to discuss the leadership election…

“Technically I didn’t break that rule,” Groves said. “Thankfully Rep. Acree stopped me before I could engage in advocacy on a leadership vote.”

Groves also said the mentioning of campaign contributions and the leadership election in the same conversation was unintentional. He said he was trying to wrap up pre-election Chiropractic Association fund-raising matters when he mentioned the campaign contributions.

“These checks were promised before the election,” Groves’s attorney, Richard Kaufman, said at the Friday morning committee hearing. “… From my client’s perspective, they were going to give Rep. Acree checks long before this leadership election came up.”

But state Sen. John Morse, a Colorado Springs Democrat who is chairman of the committee, questioned the timing. Morse said it is suspicious that Groves waited until the leadership election to try to give the $300 in contributions to Acree.

“That sort of screams of vote buying, doesn’t it?” Morse asked.

Groves responded that it depends on the interpretation…

Since that little exchange requires no additional commentary (uh, wow), we’ll just bring this back to the key point: that all of these calls from lobbyists and others wanting to “express their views” on the leadership election–and oh by the way talk checks and committee appointments–came on the same day that Rep. Acree says she discussed the leadership elections with Rep. Dave Balmer. That’s the one overarching fact that nobody’s got anything but sworn affidavits to counter, and it establishes the pattern for the whole incriminating chain of events.

In fact, if it weren’t for the solemn oath of such an unassailably truthful guy as Balmer (cue laugh track), the timing would seem pretty damn hard to mischaracterize. Especially since you can add “-jevich” to about anybody’s name these days and people get the joke immediately…