This past Thursday I was spending my time up on the hill doing a little bit of lobbying for the Young Democrats. While up there we sat in on the House Democrats caucus meeting and delivered a letter to the governor urging him to veto S.B. 16. While there we also lobbied for ethics in general and H.B. 93 in particular.

After pulling one or two members of the committee, we came up with a less than satisfying reason as to why nothing has moved: there are just too many ethics bills out there, so an interim committee will be put together to study the various ethics bills and come up with a solid solution.

This, to me, is weak sauce – we have a lot of bills that have come about from a true need to act, so what are we going to do? Put it off even longer. The simple fact of the matter is that this is yet another tactic to kill bills that Democrats are proposing to clean up the issue.

Now I don’t doubt that legislators want to study the bills that come before them regarding this issue; some bills are harsher than others and some bills would, undoubtedly, cancel each other out. But we also have a similar amount of bills regarding cell phones in cars and there does not seem to be a problem prioritizing those bills.

The simple fact of the matter is that legislators don’t want to act on ethics and this delay tactic is proof of that.