Sunshine: Lawyer-Style

By FITSNews || With taxpayers placing an especially high premium on transparency these days, it’s only natural that candidates for public office at all levels of government are doing everything within their power to position themselves as “pro-sunshine.”

This is especially true in the race to lead South Carolina’s capital city.  Sadly, Columbia, S.C. has become a bureaucratic hellhole of taxpayer-funded anti-competitiveness where governmental incompetence, fiscal recklessness and outright corruption on the part of public officials has assumed epidemic proportions and unprecedented costs.

Famously dubbed the “Face of the Recession” two years ago, things have only gotten worse in Columbia over the last two years as soaring deficits and unwise investments combined with criminal and unethical behavior on the part of city leaders has intensified.  And meanwhile, these same corrupt leaders are asking local residents and businesses to should an 11 percent tax hike as well as additional costs associated with a $154 million bailout of a failed University of South Carolina development.

The “hope and change” counterpoint to all this status quo-ness (so far) has been the candidacy of Columbia attorney Steve Benjamin, who has run a near-flawless Obama-style campaign that has stressed upbeat rhetoric and policies that (at first blush) would appear to be in keeping with fiscally conservative virtues.

Of course we all know what happened with Obama, don’t we?  In fact, just ask any “middle class” citizen where the hell their promised tax cut went and see what they tell you …

Also, Benjamin has been endorsed by a D.C. “poverty pimp” Jim Clyburn, who doesn’t exactly throw his weight around on behalf of reformers.

Anyway, Benjamin has been stressing government transparency lately, including a release yesterday that outlined a series of proposals he says will restore the people’s faith in their city institutions.

“The culture of carelessness infecting our government has been well documented,” Benjamin said in unveiling his proposals. “It must end here and, as Mayor, I will open the City Hall’s doors to the people of Columbia – together, we will let in the sunshine.”

Sounds good, right?

A page out of S.C. Gov. Mark Sanford’s (old) book, right?

And on the surface, Benjamin appears to have done everything you would want a candidate for public office to do in terms of making himself transparent.  He’s stepped down from various boards and commissions and has even divested his interest in projects connected to the city.

Of course one of those projects – The River’s Edge – is the subject of some scrutiny these days, but we’ll have more on that “development” later.

The bigger picture question for Benjamin – and frankly for Steve Morrison (the other attorney in this race) – revolves around how they plan on handling their previous business dealings with the city and the numerous clients they have represented in the past?

Seriously, between Benjamin and Morrison we could be talking about literally hundreds of conflicts of interest here, right?

And what if these entities came before the city asking for money?  What, exactly, would Benjamin and Morrison be required to disclose about their past affiliations? And even more importantly from a taxpayer standpoint, what would Benjamin and Morrison be prevented from disclosing due to attorney-client privilege?

Think about it … what if attorney-client privilege prevented Benjamin or Morrison from informing city leaders of the true financial situation of a company they previously represented?  Or what if the city was about to hire an individual that Benjamin or Morrison knew was unfit for the position?

After all, we know for a fact that Morrison has straight up lied about his involvement with payday lenders, which leads us to believe that his default setting in this situation would simply be to continue lying and hope no one ever noticed any connection. Being unethical is just how he rolls, people.

In a city as corrupt as Columbia, though, that’s simply not good enough … and frankly neither are Benjamin’s transparency proposals, unless he is willing to publicly disclose every client he’s every worked for (legally or in a lobbying capacity) and announce that they are all waiving attorney-client privilege.

Same for Morrison.

Obviously all lawyers have conflicts, but not all lawyers have been as deeply involved in South Carolina politics as these two … and obviously  not all lawyers are running for mayor.

Accordingly, we would challenge Benjamin and Morrison to put some actual teeth behind their transparency plans instead of just talking about how important an issue it is.