Bacon's Rebellion

On Tuesday I declared the ethics flap involving Sens. Kenneth Stolle, R-Virginia Beach, and Thomas Norment Jr., R-James City, to be “Case closed.” Perhaps I was premature. David Nixon, the Roanoke attorney who charged the two veteran politicians of conflict of interest, now levels similar accusations against two members of the ethics panel that absolved them.

According to a prepared statement issued by Nixon’s office:

In an addendum to the ethics complaints filed in February, Nixon requested that two panel members who had given donations to Stolle or to the political action committee for Norment and Stolle recuse themselves. Former Senators Wiley Mitchell and Robert Calhoun refused. Mitchell donated directly to Senator Stolle just five months ago, and he has contributed twice prior to that (Source: http://www.vpap.org/). In 2005, the record shows he also donated to Virginians for Responsible Government, which according to VPAP is a political action committee set up “to provide support for the so-called ‘Gang of Five’ Republican Senators – Chichester, Norment, Stosch, Stolle, Wampler…” Calhoun also gave to the same PAC in 2002.

Both Mitchell and Calhoun also represent clients with a stake in the outcome of eminent domain legislation, the issue in which Nixon claims Norment and Stolle were conflicted. During the hearing Nixon provided additional information documenting the alleged conflicts, which I have appended to the “comments” section of this post. Continues the prepared statement:

“The procedure established in the General Assembly Conflicts of Interest Act was set up by the Senate to police itself. The ethics panel refused to open the hearing to the public and they refused to give any explanation of why they exonerated the two Senators,” said Nixon. “Ethics hearings especially should be carried out in the light of day and under the scrutiny of the public and the press. The blatant irony of an ethics panel hearing and its ruling being closed to the public seems… well, unethical. If the Senators did nothing wrong, then why won’t the panel tell us how they arrived at that conclusion based on the evidence?” Nixon queried.

An editorial writer at the Virginian-Pilot is sympathic to Nixon’s new allegations. Writes the pundit:

The ethics advisory panel consists of three former senators and one former college president, all of whom have long-term relationships to one degree or another with the senators under scrutiny. All the current members are admirable, accomplished people, but an ethics advisory panel ought not to consist of folks who could legitimately be accused of being cronies. …

Here in a nutshell is what’s wrong with ethics regulation in Virginia government. It’s so inbred, so devoid of accountability, that even if a right action is taken, it smells.

Taking conflicts of interest seriously is what sets Virginia apart from New Jersey, Chicago, Lousiana and other entrepots of dealing in political favors. The blogosphere needs to shine some sunlight on these kinds of relationships.

There has been an undercurrent through the coverage of the Virginia Tech killings regarding what, exactly, is the appropriate response for those who were not directly affected by the events.

The Wall Street Journal’s Dan Henninger called it the “numbing down” of America, where the mass of people have become “hollowed out” by the seemingly endless parade of tragedies, large and small. Over the weekend, Peggy Noonan wrote of the “emptiness of phrases used by the media and by political figures, and how pro forma and lifeless and cold they are.”

Then, there is Christopher Hitchens, who takes a far harder, some would say callous, look at the emotional display after the shootings:

It was my friend Adolph Reed who first pointed out this tendency to what he called “vicarious identification.” At the time of the murder of Lisa Steinberg in New York in 1987, he was struck by the tendency of crowds to show up for funerals of people they didn’t know, often throwing teddy bears over the railings and in other ways showing that (as well as needing to get a life) they in some bizarre way seemed to need to get a death. The hysteria that followed a traffic accident in Paris involving a disco princess—surely the most hyped non-event of all time—seemed to suggest an even wider surrender to the overwhelming need to emote: The less at stake, the greater the grieving.

And surrender may be the keyword here. What, for instance, is this dismal rush to lower the national colors all the damned time? At times of real crisis and genuine emergency, such as the assault on our society that was mounted almost six years ago, some emotion could be pardoned. But even then, the signs of sickliness and foolishness were incipient (as in Billy Graham’s disgusting sermon at the National Cathedral where he spoke of the victims being “called into eternity”). If we did this every time, the flag would spend its entire time drooping. One should express a decent sympathy for the families and friends of the murdered, a decent sympathy that ought to be accompanied by a decent reticence. Because Virginia Tech—alas for poor humanity—was a calamity with no implications beyond itself. In the meantime, and in expectation of rather stiffer challenges to our composure, we might practice nailing the colors to the mast rather than engaging in a permanent dress rehearsal for masochism and the lachrymose.

Provacative, yes (it is his stock in trade). But is there a grain of truth here?

Via Slate comes a facsimile of the papers which called for the hospitalization of Cho Seung-Hui as he “present[ed] an imminent danger to self or others as a result of mental illness, or is so seriously mentally ill as to be substantially unable to care for self and is incapable of volunteering or unwilling to volunteer for treatment.”

I’m agnostic on gun control — I see the merits of both points of view. So, I don’t necessarily embrace the point of view of Pierre LeMieux with the Independent Institute, but I find it worthy of discussion. In an essay published yesterday, he argues:

Contrast the horrific Virginia Tech shootings with the January 2002 killings at Virginia’s Appalachian Law School. Within minutes of shooting three people in the dean’s office, disgruntled student Peter Odighizuwa was stopped by two students who had retrieved handguns from their cars. They disarmed the killer and turned him over to the police.

In other words, in society of armed citizens, a crazed killer might manage to kill two or three people, but somebody would take him out before the body count reached 32. I’m not sure if that scenario would have worked at Virginia Tech — Cho had shrewdly chained the doors to Norris Hall shut. Students would not have been able to run out to their cars. But Lemieux’s larger point is worth contemplating.

In a similar vein of the guns-don’t-kill-people, people-kill-people argument, it has been noted that the male citizens of Switzerland are required to serve in the military and required to keep weapons stored in their houses, but the Swiss have a low homicide rate. Which leads me to ask, is the high homicide rate in the United States due to our easy access to guns, or is it due to something perverse about our culture — perhaps the increasingly pervasive attitude that everyone should display or vent their emotions rather than rein them in… or the cult of victimization that encourages people to lash out at others rather than look within… or, as noted by Norm Leahy yesterday (“Cockburn’s Chemicals“), the ubiquitious prescription of anti-depressant drugs?

Finally, I would ask, if misfits like Cho Seung-Hui had been cut off from access to guns, would that have stopped them from killing people? All we have to do is look to the Middle East to find an alternative model for committing mass murder: car bombs and suicide bombs. Bomb-making instructions can be found on the Internet. How long will it be before some whack job decides to exact his vengeance with a bomb? Timothy McVeigh pulled it off and the death toll was far higher than in Blacksburg.

Again, I’m not arguing a particular point of view here. I’m just asking questions. My suspicion is that there simply are no easy answers.

Sens. Kenneth Stolle, R-Virginia Beach, and Thomas Norment Jr., R-James City, have been cleared of conflict-of-interest charges by the Senate Ethics Advisory Panel.

David Nixon, a Roanoke lawyer and Republican activist had filed a complaint noting that the two prominent lawmakers were employed by Kaufman and Canoles, the leading law firm in Hampton Roads, which represents a number of clients that acquire land through eminent domain. The involvement of Stolle and Norment in shaping eminent domain legislation, Nixon charged, amounted to a conflict of interest.

The panel disagreed — unanimously. Reports Christina Nuckols with the Virginian-Pilot:

“This was a frivolous action that was calculated to try to prevent two senior legislators from voting on an important issue,” Stolle said. Stolle and Norment abstained earlier this year when the Senate voted on eminent domain bills. Stolle said he is not sure that those abstentions affected the final outcome of the legislation.

Nixon’s argument was long on suggestion but short on specifics. (See my previous post, “The Case Against Norment: Suggestive but Not Yet Persuasive.”) The evidence of a conflict of interest did not seem compelling to me when I wrote, and it obviously didn’t seem compelling to the panelists who cleared Norment and Stolle.

However, Nixon probed into relationships that are well worth highlighting. Norment, who has carried water for Dominion on matters of electric deregulation and reregulation, has significant holdings of Dominion stock (valued between $50,000 and $250,000, according to the Virginia Public Access Project), and accepted a Dominion invitation to go on a hunting trip in 2001. Furthermore, according to VPAP, he has received $11,800 in campaign contributions from Dominion during the current reporting cycle.

It seems undeniable that Norment is cozy with Virginia’s biggest power company, and also that he was one of the company’s most dependable allies while Dominion was steering legislation potentially worth billions of dollars through the General Assembly. There’s nothing illegal or unethical about his connections, but they are something that voters might want to bear in mind when they consider whom they want representing them.

Writing in Counterpunch, confirmed man of the left Alexander Cockburn offers his jarring, almost anarchist, take on the murders at Virginia Tech last week. It’s a lengthy piece, and one that will, no doubt, raise more than a few hackles. But sifting through it all, and in a way following-up on Jim’s post from earlier, there is this:

What should be banned from campuses are not weapons but prescriptions for antidepressants. Eric Harris, co-slayer (with Dylan Klebold) of twelve students and a teacher in the Columbine school shootings in 1999, was on Luvox, a Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor (SSRI) of the same class as Prozac, Zoloft, and Paxil. Initially Harris had been prescribed Zoloft, but told his doctor he was having suicidal and homicidal fantasies. So the doc shifted him to Luvox.

16-year Jeff Weise, who killed 10 schoolmates at Red Lake High School on an Indian Reservation in 2005 was on Prozac. The manufacturer said 4 per cent of children in one of its tests of Luvox developed short-term mania. Other studies of the SSRI anti-depressants have claimed they have a 15 per cent chance of prompting suicidal or homicidal reactions.

Cho Seung-Hui was on a prescription drug for his psychological problems. What exactly it was not yet been disclosed, though the likelihood of it being an anti-depressant is high, since doctors on campuses dispense prescriptions for them like confetti.

Later, Cockburn has a “sampler” of spree-killers and their link to anti-depressants. Was the presence or absence of such drugs a factor in the most recent murders as it appears they may have been in previous cases?

Since the morning of April 16, Virginia Tech students, professors and administrators have displayed extraordinary dignity in the face of one of the nation’s great tragedies. My respect for the institution and those who are part of it has increased immeasurably. I can only hope that I, if faced with a comparable horror, would acquit myself as well.

Although punditry is my business, I have largely withheld commentary about the public policy implications of the shooting rampage for two reasons: First, I thought it appropriate to let the mourners bury the bodies of their loved ones before pontificating on the meaning of it all, and second I wanted to see more facts emerge. We do no honor to the fallen by jumping to conclusions based on preconceived notions. Gov. Timothy M. Kaine has done precisely the right thing by setting up an independent review panel to inquire into the April 16 tragedy and the events leading up to it.

Presumably, the review panel will endeavor to determine if the rampage could have been prevented, and what it will take to prevent another such incident from reoccurring. The panel’s inquiries undoubtedly will follow many of the same trails blazed by journalists investigating the massacre: Were Virginia’s gun laws tight enough? Is Virginia’s system for treating the mentally ill too lax and unaccountable?

To my mind, the central question is this: How was it possible for someone as mentally unstable as Cho Seung-Hui to acquire two guns? In 2005, a Montgomery County magistrate had found the student to be a danger to himself and others. But, according to Bill McElway with the Richmond Times-Dispatch, state and federal authorities disagree over whether such a finding restricted Cho’s right to purchase a gun.

After the magistrate found Cho to be a danger, McElway reports, he was detained for assessment at a county mental facility, then released the next day. State law did not permit him to be institutionalized: He was to be provided the least restrictive appropriate form of medical care: in his case, outpatient treatment. Because he was released, authorities did not deem him to have been “admitted” to a mental facility. Writes McElway:

That means no record of the person’s assessment, even if the person is found to be mentally ill and a danger, is forwarded to law-enforcement agencies for background check purposes.

So, the “obvious” remedy is to tighten up reporting requirements for mentally ill patients. If future Chos are found to be a danger, that information should be conveyed to law enforcement officials and should be grounds for blocking the purchase of hand guns.

But it’s not quite so simple. The desire to restrict the rights of crazy people to acquire hand guns — a restriction that I totally support, incidentally — will run smack into the rights of the mentally ill. I dare say that the review panel will uncover a host of advocates who work tirelessly to expand the privacy rights of the mentally ill, to avoid actions that would stigmatize them and to require due process before institutionalizing them against their will or depriving them of other civil rights. Cho fell through the cracks, I hypothesize, because a broad-based social movement dedicated to taking the mentally ill out of institutions and integrating them back into society has worked diligently to expand their rights.

We might well find that the problem in Cho’s case wasn’t insufficiently tight gun laws, or inadequate spending on mental health care. As Walt Kelly said, “We have found the enemy and it is us” — our culture and legal system, which gives primacy of the rights of individuals, including those of the mentally ill, over the collective good. Should the review panel find that to be the case, the “obvious” solution isn’t so obvious at all.

Yesterday, a Senate ethics board heard allegations that Senators Thomas K. Norment, R-Williamsburg and Kenneth W. Stolle, R-Virginia Beach have engaged in a conflict of interest when legislating property rights. According to Roanoke lawyer G. David Nixon, the two powerful lawmakers have a conflict because they either represent clients that acquire property through eminent domain or engage in rainmaking activity for clients that do.

(See our coverage of this issue in “Is There a Conflict of Interest in the State Senate?” and “The Case Against Norment: Suggestive But Not Persuasive.”

The panel, headed by former James Madison University President Ronald E. Carrier, met five hours. Norment testified before the group, according to an article by Jeff Schapiro in the Richmond Times-Dispatch. (Schapiro did not say whether Stolle testified.) The panel is required to rule on the allegations in June.