Assembly Votes to Create Its Own Ethics Committee

The Assembly voted overwhelmingly Monday to establish its own ethics committee.

The new Assembly Legislative Ethics Committee will have three Republicans and three Democrats. It will be able to investigate any complaints that Assembly members have violated standards of conduct, hold hearings and recommend disciplinary action to the full Assembly. Boosters of the idea, which passed 65 to 3, said it was a positive step toward getting the Assembly to police its own ranks.

But Diane Martinez of Monterey Park, who cast one of the three votes against, compared it to a “fox guarding a henhouse.” She doubted the committee, for example, would investigate allegations of campaign wrongdoing in last November’s election of Assemblyman Scott Baugh (R-Huntington Beach).

Three Republican campaign staffers, including one who worked for Speaker Curt Pringle (R-Garden Grove), have pleaded guilty to misdemeanor counts in the case.

“It doesn’t matter if this scandal leads to Curt Pringle or not,” Bates said. Pringle will “find people for the committee who will take forever to find nothing wrong.”

Pringle said, however, that the committee was an important addition to the Assembly and “represents the consensus of both parties of this house.”

The committee’s biggest Democratic booster, Assemblywoman Kerry Mazzoni of Novato, said she had been pushing for formation of the committee long before Pringle took the speaker’s chair and months before the Baugh investigation began.

Under the new committee’s rules, two members from each party must agree before the committee can act against a legislator.

Currently, there is a Joint Legislative Ethics Committee, but it has been inactive for several years because the Senate created its own committee and does not participate in the joint one.