This from today's Lexington Herald Leader:
Although the nuances of state personnel laws might indeed be "inefficient" or "confusing" as Fletcher noted, the gist is straightforward: the roughly 30,000 rank-and-file state employees are to be hired on qualifications, not for political reasons. (Go here for the whole story.)
With this, we finally reach the heart of the matter. Governor Fletcher has insisted that while mistakes may have been made, laws were not broken. Attorney General Stumbo has built his "smoking gun" case on this "gist."
The challenge to finding the truth in this matter now involves bridging this gap.
The onus is on Stumbo to not only demonstrate "gist," but to show that laws were broken. Failing that, the cost of this investigation will clearly be attributable to anti-Republican political motivations. We hear precious little from the mainstream media about this possibility. We hear only assumed guilt. But laws are not enforced solely on the "gist" of the law. If they were, maybe this episode would already be over. It isn't over.
Pundits who scoff at the Governor's review of the merit system willfully miss the point: Governor Fletcher didn't break this system. It was already broken and left unchallenged for many years of Democrat rule, during which Republicans were almost completely shut out of these jobs, gist or no gist. (Wouldn't it be interesting to see the media do an in-depth review of political affiliation of merit employees?) Once again, the Dems put themselves in the untenable position of hoping that nothing goes right and nothing gets fixed.
