Zimmerman: Legislature dropped the ball on ethics reform

From the tone of his letter to supporters, Rep. Jake Zimmerman, D-Olivette, was not particularly thrilled with the "ethics" legislation package that passed Friday and who can blame him?

We've reached the end of Missouri's regular legislative session.As always, I wanted to drop a brief note to share a few thoughts, now that we have a moment to take a deep breath and reflect.
For me personally, it's been an unusually successful session. Two bills I sponsored reached the Governor's desk (one is about protecting Social Security numbers from needless disclosure, and the other should save the state some money by streamlining administration of a scholarship program). As ever, I also had a lot to say about consumer protection, and I helped strip nasty anti-consumer provisions from several bills. My fingerprints are on a few other good things, such as access reform that should help lower our phone rates and some innovative new strategies to get more children health coverage.
In spite of those personal victories, it's been a bittersweet year. The budget is awful: key priorities were badly hurt, difficult choices weren't made, and our community will suffer. Worse, the budget is still out of balance because my colleagues weren't willing to make the really tough choices, leaving more pain to come at the hands of the Governor. Meanwhile, partisan bickering squandered opportunities to enact needed reforms and strengthen our economic development tools.
Most painfully, the legislature dropped the ball on ethics reform. Anyone who knows me knows this has been my fight for a long time. This year, it finally became "sexy" and I was hopeful that a strong, bipartisan ethics bill would finally pass. I was honored to be the lead sponsor of Governor Nixon's ethics package in the House, and I really thought we'd get it done. Instead, after a partisan hijacking, my colleagues passed what one Republican legislator called "ethics lite."There are still no campaign finance limits, no ban on becoming a lobbyist immediately after leaving the legislature, and no ban on receiving"consulting" payments as kickbacks from one's legislative colleagues.
So, as always: we take the good with the bad. I'm glad for my own modest victories, and encouraged that we finally had a serious conversation about ethics reform. 
I'll be sharing more thoughts in the days ahead as the Governor signs some of these bills into law and then there's November to look forward to, and a vigorous campaign ahead. (I have not one but TWO opponents this year!) For now, I'm sleeping off the exhaustion and mostly just glad to be back in St. Louis County.