State Rep. Matt Simpson (R-Daphne) plans to continue fighting for legislation that would replace the current Alabama Ethics Code for state employees and elected officials. Simpson’s proposed ethics reform bill passed the House by a vote of 79-9 earlier this year, but did not advance the Senate committee process by the last day of the legislative session.
Simpson kept the need for ethics reform focal during a Tuesday appearance on WVNN’s “The Yaffee Program.”
“This is a chance to just kind of look at everything that we’ve got and say there’s a problem in Alabama’s ethics laws,” Simpson said. “The Supreme Court has said it. The Court of Criminal Appeals has said it over and over. That’s the message that we’ve received, is there are problems in Alabama’s ethics laws. There was a commission that was created in 2019 that looked at it. They filed a report and said there are problems with Alabama’s ethics laws.”
“So, you know, it’s one of those things of didn’t get elected to just kind of put my head in the sand,” he added, “and bury my head and say it’s going to be hard, or it’s going to be difficult, or Al.com is going to write some terrible, bad things about me. I came in to try to see a problem, fix a problem, and just resolve the problem.”
While the bill didn’t pass, the Senate Judiciary Committee approved for the legislative services agency to hire a national expert to review the current laws.
“He’s he’s already signed this contract,” Simpson explained. “He’s already been looking at it, already going over it. He’s going to give a report to the legislature. I anticipate that to be around the first of December. We’re going to use that report to follow up on the legislation that I had, correct some of the issues that he’s identified, to look at what he’s got, what he sees nationwide as a topic, as where other states are, where the national government is, and the opportunity there is.”
Simpson said there is widespread agreement that the current laws are too “vague.”
“The courts have said over and over that they’re too vague, that the laws are confusing and confounding,” he argued. “Look, I’ve been a practicing lawyer for 19 years. I’ve been a prosecutor for 14 of those years and prosecuted ethics cases as part of my job. Sometimes I still don’t understand what the laws say. I still have to call the Ethics Commission to ask them, ‘Hey, can I do this? Can I not do this?'”
“The problem that we have is these ethics laws don’t just affect it’s not just the poor, pitiful legislature that I’m talking about,” he added. “It affects every county, state and city employee directly. There’s 300,000 people that the ethics laws directly affects because they are directly employed by the government. But by the way the laws are written, they include their families, their spouses, their brothers, their extended families.”
Yaffee is a contributing writer to Yellowhammer News and hosts “The Yaffee Program” weekdays 9-11 a.m. on WVNN. You can follow him on Twitter @Yaffee
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