Transparency News 2/18/15
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State and Local Stories
A state legislator who has seemed to embody the push and pull of ethics reform in anything-goes Virginia will represent the Senate on a new ethics council meant to usher in a new era. Senate Majority Leader Thomas K. Norment Jr. (R-James City) was appointed Tuesday to the Virginia Conflict of Interest and Ethics Advisory Council. Norment has called for and sponsored legislation to limit gifts to legislators in the wake of a gifts scandal involving former governor Robert F. McDonnell (R) and his wife, Maureen. But Norment has also accepted free hunting trips from Virginia businesses and lashed out at the media over the focus on ethics. Norment’s appointment to the 15-member council, made by the Senate and confirmed by the House Tuesday, can be viewed as ironic and fitting all at once, said Quentin Kidd, a professor of public policy at Christopher Newport University.
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/thomas-norment-jr-appointed-to-virginia-ethics-council/2015/02/17/576ed6ea-b6cc-11e4-9423-f3d0a1ec335c_story.html?wprss=rss_local
National Stories
The CIA has some good news for a group demanding a copy of the agency’s database of nearly 12 million declassified documents: it won’t take 28 years to release the set, only six. A Central Intelligence Agency official told a federal judge Friday that the spy agency has found a way to streamline the review process so that the 11.6 million pages of records requested by the open government outlet Muckrock can be released with only a “spot check” of the documents for snippets of stray classified information that might get tangled up in the files during the release process. As a result of the “extremely unique circumstances,” CIA “has determined it can deviate from the standard security and quality assurance review protocols as a matter of administrative discretion, and instead conduct a more truncated review,” CIA Attorney Martha Lutz wrote. Just last month, the CIA was refusing Muckrock’s request outright as too broad and burdensome.
Politico
http://www.politico.com/blogs/under-the-radar/
Editorials/Columns
It has to be one of the creepiest bills ever considered by the General Assembly. Senate Bill 1393, sponsored by Sen. Richard Saslaw (D-Fairfax), would drop a veil of secrecy over how Virginia executes prisoners by lethal injection. Its backers, including Gov. Terry McAuliffe, are pushing it against a backdrop of global politics and questions of morality. For a while, Virginia did have a good supply of killer drugs but by 2014, then it ran short or drugs went past their expiration dates. A solution is to use pharmacies to compound drugs for executions but it could expose the firms to lawsuits. So, as is too often typical in Virginia, Saslaw & Company started pushing the rights of private companies over the public’s right to know. His bill has drawn criticism from the American Civil Liberties Union, the Virginia Coalition for Open Government and the Society of Professional Journalists.
Peter Galuszka, Bacon’s Rebellion
http://www.baconsrebellion.com/2015/02/why-hide-details-of-lethal-injection.html
To its credit, the General Assembly passed reform legislation. The measures lower the value of gifts elected officials can accept from lobbyists or those with state business from $250 to $100. They also address the issue of "intangible" perks. But don’t expect every Virginia lawmaker to behave. If it had it not been for federal prosecutors, the first governor from the commonwealth to be convicted of corruption might be barnstorming for president of the United States. Back in the Old Dominion they’d rather blame the barking dog than the chicken thief. "You know why we are doing this," state Sen. Tommy Norment (R-Williamsburg) blustered at a hearing on the ethics bill, according to The Virginian-Pilot. "Because the media is on our back." Norment rationalized that the press forced the ethics vote. To shelve the bills would be disastrous, he warned his colleagues. “Trust me, we will be lambasted, we will be ridiculed, we will appear on every opinion page and every newspaper in the Commonwealth of Virginia because we did not act," Norment lamented. Got that right. Woof, woof.
Loudoun Times-Mirror
http://www.loudountimes.com/news/opinions
