Puyallup lawmaker daring to use social media is my hero

She’s a dangerous woman; a thought criminal — if you are to believe what some of the people at the Washington State Ethics Board say about Melanie Stambaugh.

For the first time in 22 years, the full ethics board convened to put State Rep. Melanie Stambaugh on trial. The 26-year old Republican from Puyallup could be fined up to $220,000. Why?

Ladies and gentlemen, if you have young children I don’t want to freak you out or alarm you. But, Rep. Stambaugh has … posted Youtube videos of public meetings and government created materials.

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It was with some trepidation and fear that I welcomed Stambaugh to my show. To hear specifics on what she is accused of, please listen to the whole interview here, but this is the main highlight: Stambaugh believes her duty is to inform her constituents about the actions that she does on our behalf, so she takes publicly available videos created by the state and placed them on social media for her constituents. By sharing those videos, she is, apparently, being unethical.

Stambaugh and ethics

She is accused of violating ethics rules 44 times by posting state-funded photos and videos to the Facebook page she used during her campaign. If you’d like, you can watch the hearing here. Essentially, she is being targeted because of a law made back in the ’90s before social media even existed. The law is intended to maintain access to public records while blocking the use of state resources in campaigns.

It is extremely difficult for me to be astonished by government – even in Olympia. But this one got me. Rep. Stambaugh was literally repurposing the shareable public materials that were created with our tax dollars – not anything she created on her own – and she is showing them to taxpayers. So, of course, she faces an enormous fine.

This is common sense. This is our material. But its gets worse. This wasn’t a court. It came down to one person who makes all the rules.

“This hearing, I call it a travesty of justice,” Stambaugh told me. “It is what they call a quasi-judicial hearing and the structure you would assume there to be in a courtroom, they flipped that on its head and that is not how the public hearing was conducted. Basically, the administrative law judge creates the rules and you are at the mercy of their system. One of my constituents who came down to see the hearing, he said it’s a mockery of justice — is what he experienced for five hours last Tuesday.”

What is even more farcical about all this — there is a cost associated with creating these videos and images. In a commercial world, we would be looking at a cost-per user or cost-per-view. So she is actually increasing the efficiency. You would assume they create these things to be seen. By showing them to her constituents, she’s actually increasing the deficiency and decreasing the cost per view. It’s astonishing.

What’s more, the Attorney General and the ethics board refused to comment on the constitutionality of this because they are “not qualified to comment on the constitution.”

“That is exactly what they said,” she told me. “When council brought up the fact that the ethics board is trying to inhibit the freedom of speech of our government affairs, which is under the strictest scrutiny in our United States Constitution, the assistant attorney general stated they didn’t have the qualification to discuss that.”

“What is so disturbing about this is I believe the Constitution is the foundation of which we live our lives and have our rights, that those are built upon,” she said. “And we have men and women who have fought for hundreds of years to protect the rights that we have, and you can go into that public administrative law hearing and they can disavow any oath that they’ve taken to uphold the Constitution of justice in one sentence, and that is why this was a travesty of justice.”

She is my hero. Clearly, this a constitutional issue on many, many fronts. It’s also an open records and public records issue. She should appeal this. And, if they fine her, I will start a GoFundMe page and spend time imploring my listeners to ensure she doesn’t pay a dime. I’ll do anything I can to immunize her from these costs. We should always help these kinds of legislators — the ones who are actually following an ethical code.