Ethics Hearing Shows Need for More Openness, Spotlights a New Leader

By Jack Betts, Staff Writer
Published March 9, 2008

The House ethics committee's recommendation that Rep. Thomas Wright, D-New Hanover, be expelled for ethics violations was the big news from last week's hearings. But three other things became crystal clear:

The House really botched its responsibility in recent years to assure the public it would give proper oversight to ethical issues. By quietly dispensing with an ethics complaint on a comparatively minor offense against a white legislator before pursuing Wright, a prominent African American lawmaker, the House unwittingly gave Wright's attorneys reason to play the race card and undermine the hearings on a more serious matter.

The House's failure last year to even disclose how it handled an ethics complaint about House rules against Rep. Pryor Gibson, D-Anson, shows the flaw in the system. It requires confidentiality unless a complaint is found to have merit. When the public knows the complaint was filed and the House refuses to say what happened or why, folks are entitled to wonder what's going on.

Ethics committee chairman Rick Glazier, D-Cumberland, said, accurately and appropriately, that Gibson's and Wright's offenses were starkly different. But the handling of the Gibson complaint last year, without an announcement of its resolution until last week, did not serve the House well. It left the public with the impression it was willing to overlook ethical lapses as long as the legislator is in good standing with the leadership. I think that has changed. A lot of folks won't.

Thomas Wright's understanding of his public trust was as simple as it was greedy: Serving in elective office is an opportunity to profit, and he rarely seemed to miss a chance to line his pockets. He even palmed thousands of dollars he raised for a medical foundation he was creating, on the specious argument it was "sweat equity" he deserved for a lot of hard work raising money.

When Wright was finally called to account by the ethics committee's preliminary vote on the charges, he posed this pathetic query: "How dare my colleagues sit in judgment and pass judgment on me?"

No wonder he thought that. The House never moved against his ally, former Speaker Jim Black, who also misused campaign contributions and bribed a legislator to help keep him in power. If the House wouldn't move against Black, Wright had reason to assume they'd never move against him, either.

The House has a bright new luminary, thanks to the steady and unflinching performance of Glazier. He chaired the hearing like the even-tempered judge he might one day become.

He sorted through some difficult issues with equanimity. He gave Wright's attorneys opportunity to speak on a number of disputed points. He withstood a personal and unwarranted attack on his character with poise and dignity. Wright's attorneys argued not only that the committee was using a double standard by pursuing a black man but not a white man with an ethics complaint lodged against him, but also argued that Glazier was racially biased.

Glazier's measured response was not only persuasive but poignant. As a lawyer he had worked for civil rights for all, and as a Jew he himself had suffered from discrimination. His well-reasoned response captured the attention of everyone in the hearing room. Wright's offenses, he said later in summing up the matter, were "breathtaking" in their scope and deserved expulsion from the General Assembly.

Glazier's deft handling of this difficult hearing hearkened up the performance of the late U.S. Sen. Sam Ervin of Morganton, who early in his career took on the tough job of managing the Senate's sanctioning of the red-baiting Sen. Joe McCarthy more than half a century ago. That work marked Ervin as a man of substance and leadership in the Senate years before his work on the Watergate committee. Rick Glazier's handling of the ethics committee hearings in the state House marks him as a solid, unflappable, determined leader ready for any tough job.