Ham on toast

August 26, 2009 2:46 am

THE Virginia House GOP leader- ship has almost surely lost Del. Phil Hamilton's seat in Democratic-leaning Newport News, but it stands to suffer wider damage unless it disposes quickly of, to evoke one of Charlie Brown's chums, this ethical Pigpen. House Speaker Bill Howell is right to speed the conflict-of-interests scandal to resolution, but in the House Ethics Advisory Panel has chosen the inferior vehicle for doing so.

FOIAed e-mails reveal Mr. Hamilton to be a flat-out liar when he denied pursuing (and finally landing) a $40,000-per-year part-time job at the new Old Dominion University teaching center before the influential budgeteer put in a successful $500,000 amendment for the center's creation in 2007. Pinning Mr. Hamilton's hide to the barn door is his 2006 e-mail to a former ODU president: "If possible, I would like to discuss this possibility [of employment] with you prior to my leaving for the General Assembly on January 8, 2007."

This is textbook-entry manipulation, for private gain, of the public purse. Yet if Mr. Hamilton answers to the advisory panel, he can request a private hearing at which the public will be ignorant not only of the details of a public official's deplorable behavior, but also that of the officials of a public college.

Let Mr. Hamilton stand instead before the fully open House Privileges and Election Committee. A stench wafts through the capitol and the halls of ODU, both of which need thorough airing.