Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

The Texas Ethics Commission in the past year has twice displayed an appalling ignorance of the written word in its interpretation of state law.

For the official watchdog of the Texas Election Code, the third time wasn't a redemptive charm, it was a disgraceful embarrassment.

At issue is a statute that requires state officers to provide "the identification of a person or other organization from which the individual or the individual's spouse or dependent children received a gift of anything of value in excess of $250 and a description of each gift."

Most practitioners of the English language understand this section of the Government Code to mean that an officeholder or candidate must identify who gives them anything worth more than $250.

Furthermore — and this is the crucial point — an officeholder or candidate must provide a meaningful description of the gift.

The disclosure rules serve an important function. Citizens deserve to know who might be influencing the decisions of state officials and to what extent.

In March and again in September, a majority of the commission ruled that what the code says isn't what it really means. Disclosure in Texas merely requires the acknowledgement of a gift in the most vague terms.

The real-life example about which the commission ruled was a donation in the amount of $100,000. As far as the Texas Ethics Commission is concerned, "check in excess of $250" is a sufficient description — never mind the other $99,750.

In an op-ed in the San Antonio Express-News, commissioners Ross Fischer, Francisco Hernandez and R.R. "Tripp" Davenport III explained, "Unfortunately, the law fails to require the legislators to declare the value of the gift."

In another op-ed, David Reisman, the commission's executive director, stood by the interpretation that disclosure does not require "the precise value of the gift."

By a 5-3 vote on Monday, the commission again endorsed this ethical travesty.

Curiously, the commission doesn't apply the same creative ambiguity to the identity of donors. For instance, "person" or "organization" isn't interpreted to be sufficient for the disclosure of a donor's identity. Why would the commissioners think "check in excess of $250" describes a $100,000 gift?

Even if some uncertainty did exist, the Government Code allows the commission to adopt rules to administer the disclosure statute, such as establishing that the precise value of a gift must accompany its description.

The linguistically challenged commissioners have called on the Legislature to provide a law with more clarity. Lawmakers should do more. They should clear out commissioners and staff who have such a fundamentally flawed understanding of ethics laws.