The Center for Public Integrity

A new Mitt Romney campaign ad passes off opinions of a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush as though they were from a newspaper’s reporters or editors. It’s a political trick used by both sides: hijacking a news organization’s credibility.

A Mitt Romney TV ad claims the Obama administration has adopted “a plan to gut welfare reform by dropping work requirements.” The plan does neither of those things.

• Work requirements are not simply being “dropped.” States may now change the requirements — revising, adding or eliminating them — as part of a federally approved state-specific plan to increase job placement.
• And it won’t “gut” the 1996 law to ease the requirement. Benefits still won’t be paid beyond an allotted time, whether the recipient is working or not.

Romney’s ad also distorts the facts when it says that under President Obama’s plan “you wouldn’t have to work and wouldn’t have to train for a job.” The law never required all welfare recipients to work. Only 29 percent of those receiving cash assistance met the work requirement by the time President Obama took office.

Under the new policy, states can now seek a federal waiver from work-participation rules that, among other things, require welfare recipients to engage in one of 12 specific “work activities,” such as job training. But, in exchange, states must develop a plan that would provide a “more efficient or effective means to promote employment,” which may or may not include some or all of the same work activities. States also must submit an “evaluation plan” that includes “performance measures” that must be met — or the waiver could be revoked.

Ron Haskins, a former Republican House committee aide who was instrumental in the 1996 overhaul of the welfare program, told us the Obama administration should not have unilaterally changed the work-requirement rules. But Haskins said the Romney claim that Obama’s plan will “gut welfare reform” is “very misleading.”

A grieving widower in a new pro-Obama TV spot says his wife contracted cancer and died “a short time after” Mitt Romney closed the steel plant that employed him and left “my family” without health coverage. That’s not quite so.

We find this ad from Priorities USA Action to be misleading on several counts.

• Steelworker Joe Soptic’s wife, Ranae, died in 2006 — five years after the plant closed.
• She didn’t lose coverage when the plant closed. Mr. Soptic told CNN that she lost her own employer-sponsored coverage a year or two later. She had no coverage after that.
• And as we’ve reported before, when the plant closed Romney was running the 2002 Winter Olympics.

It’s fair to argue that Romney bears some responsibility for the plant’s closing — Bain Capital bought it and loaded it with debt while he was in charge of Bain. But the degree of responsibility is a matter of opinion and debate.

It’s also fair to argue that Mrs. Soptic might have lived longer if she had health coverage. Those who lack it tend to seek treatment later, become sicker, and die earlier than those who have coverage.

We’ll also note that what Romney supporters object to most strenuously about this ad is opinion, not fact. That is Soptic’s apparently heartfelt assertion that “I do not think Mitt Romney is concerned” about what “he’s done.”

We can’t speak to the state of Romney’s personal compassion. Opinions will differ on that. But it strains the facts to the breaking point to imply that this tragic death is Romney’s doing.

The North Carolina Ethics Commission has received more than 300 ethics complaints since its establishment in 2006 — but it has initiated just 18 investigations through 2010.

The Tennessee Ethics Commission, also established in 2006, has yet to find anyone guilty of an ethics violation. It has heard five complaints in five years — and thrown all of them out.

The Pennsylvania Ethics Commission takes in between 400 and 600 complaints each year. But severe budget cuts have left the panel with only five full-time investigators to handle the workload.

And last year, the Colorado Independent Ethics Commission had its full-time support staff reduced from two people to one. 

“It’s just me,” said Jane Feldman, the Colorado commission’s executive director. Feldman said she currently has an annual budget of $224,000 but — unlike commissions in many other states — no investigators or lawyers to initiate real enforcement. 

“I don’t think we’re a dirty state. I think we’re a pretty clean state,” Feldman said. “But I think there are cases, especially conflicts of interest issues, where since we don’t have an investigator we don’t follow up.”

Such tales are far from unusual. Some 41 states have government bodies that oversee and enforce state ethics laws. But an examination by the Center for Public Integrity reveals that many of them do little more than provide a false sense of security. In fact, the State Integrity Investigation — a first-of-its-kind probe of accountability in state government — gave grades of either D or F to 28 of those state ethics panels.

Arizona’s legislative session this year was as hard to track as a Stealth bomber, even for many Capitol regulars.

A bill focused on attorney’s fees turned into a controversial measure about abortion. Other bills changed subjects too. And the Legislature took just one morning of public testimony about the budget. The real wrangling over state spending was done in two months of private meetings between the governor and legislative leaders. But the details of the blueprint weren’t public until lawmakers were on the floor ready to vote.

Technology is in theory giving Arizonans unprecedented access to the Legislature, with documents posted online and meetings captured on video. But lawmakers are short-circuiting the public process, critics say, in two key areas: the budget and “strike-everything” amendments, which completely swap out the contents of a bill, often for something entirely different.

Critics say the "strikers" are the antithesis of transparency, making it harder for Arizonans to follow legislation and bypassing committee discussion. As for the state budget blueprint, more and more, the process of hashing it out has “gone underground,” said lobbyist Kevin DeMenna, a former Senate chief of staff for GOP leadership who has personally observed every legislative session since 1979.

The Legislature used to hold extensive hearings before writing a budget plan and then, after negotiating with the governor, wrap up the end product with committee hearings before taking a final vote. But that system has disappeared over the past decade.

Citing the Center for Public Integrity’s States of Disclosure project and State Integrity Investigation as a basis for reform, the nonpartisan research group Integrity Florida has issued a report calling for stronger financial disclosure requirements in the Sunshine State.

Among the report’s recommendations: requiring Florida state officials to fill out more detailed financial disclosure forms and making that information available online in a searchable database format.

Florida ranked 26^th – a grade of D – on the 2009 release of States of Disclosure, a state-by-state comparison of legislative financial disclosure laws. To improve its standing, Integrity Florida calls for adopting requirements similar to Louisiana, which dramatically raised its ranking all the way to number one in the 2009 States of Disclosure analysis. The Bayou State required all lawmakers to disclose a wide range of financial assets, including outside income, investments, and real property holdings.  Louisiana had ranked 44th in a previous States of Disclosure analysis from 2006.   

Michigan House Democrats have cited the state’s failing grade from the State Integrity Investigation in a resolution calling for investigation of alleged election irregularities.

“A recent report by the State Integrity Investigation ranked Michigan’s government 43^rd in the country in terms of accountability and risk of corruption,” stated the resolution, issued earlier this week. “The report card gave Michigan an ‘F’ grade in areas like campaign finance and legislative accountability among other areas.”

Michigan also received F’s in the categories of executive accountability, judicial accountability, civil service management, lobbying disclosure, pension fund management, ethics enforcement, insurance commission, and redistricting. It received a single A grade for internal auditing.

Overall, Michigan received an F and a score of 58 percent on the State Integrity Investigation.

The Kentucky man died in an off-road vehicle accident last year. His liver and kidneys helped save three dying patients in his home state. Musculoskeletal grafts taken from his heart, skin and bones were used in medical products used to improve the lives of 15 people around the country.  

But soon after the transplants, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) learned the organ recipients had contracted hepatitis C. It turned out the Kentucky donor had a history of substance abuse and had served prison time. The tissue bank that recycled his remains, the CDC said, had screwed up the usual testing done to verify that tissues and organs were safe.

The CDC's Office of Blood, Organ, and Other Tissue Safety deployed a team of “shoe-leather epidemiologists” to track down the tissue before someone else got sick. Unlike hearts and other organs — or blood products that come with a unique barcode — there’s no easy way to track down tissue.

Instead the team found tissues one-by-one, calling hospitals and chasing down doctors. It took nearly a month to locate all the surgeons who had implanted tissue into 15 people. A child, later found to have hepatitis C, had received an infected heart vessel patch before the tissue recall began.

In some cases, inconsistent or non-existent recordkeeping prevents medical sleuths from ever finding potentially infected tissues. In one major case that played out in 2006, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and five tissue companies moved to recall 25,000 tissues taken illegally from U.S. donors without proper consent or testing. Eight hundred of the tissues shipped overseas were never found. 

South Carolina State Sen. Mike Rose is a lucky man. The Republican lawmaker from Summerville known for championing ethics reform lost his primary bid, with his opponent winning 60 percent of the vote — but he can still stay in office. 

How is that possible? Rose is an incumbent in an election year that has seen roughly 250 non-incumbent candidates kicked off ballots all across South Carolina because of a controversial State Supreme Court decision and a filing technicality related to campaign paperwork.

It used to be that candidates had to file a business disclosure form, called a Statement of Economic Interest, to their party official along with their petition for candidacy. But in 2010, the law was changed to mandate they also file electronically with the state’s ethics agency.

So, many candidates filed online or in person, but not both. Some did neither. (Incumbents were exempt because they already had a copy on file.)

After a lawsuit was filed to determine the fate of those who hadn’t filed properly, the State Supreme Court ruled in May that any candidate who did not file both online and in person should be removed from the ballot.

The fallout was catastrophic and meant that roughly 250 non-incumbent candidates for local and state offices around the Palmetto State were struck from their ballots in a year when all 170 South Carolina House and Senate seats were up for grabs. 

Reverberations from the High Court’s ruling are still being felt.

Consider state Senate candidate Sean Bennett who beat incumbent Rose nearly a month ago by a large margin at the polls.