Sen. Les Bock, D-Boise, noted that Democrats in the Legislature introduced a package of ethics reforms at the start of the sessino. "The can got kicked down the road, and it looked like nothing was going to happen," he said. "An ethics issue did arise ... because there was a real ethics issue that needed to be investigated. And believe me this was a painful process for all, it was a gut-wrenching experience for me personally. ... This was very difficult."

Now, he said, "We have a set of changes in front of us, and I just think they're lacking. I think they're lacking for a number of reasons. First of all, like I said, the first time I saw these changes was this morning. It just seems a bit too much like, you know, we need that window dressing ... to show we're going to be responding to some of the events that occurred in the Senate in the last few weeks, and we don't have to take the time to draft a thoughtful, detailed statutory structure to put in place ethics rules that make sense, that satisfy those who are governed, and to allow disclosure ... so that the governed can make decisions about who they should elect and who they should not."

Bock said Democrats had some concerns about the current process, in which an immediate complaint is filed and is made public, even if it's "totally, totally frivolous or false." But he said, "What we've done with this new set of rules is to go to the opposite extreme. Rather than strengthening with these new rules, we're weakening them. ... .The person that submits the complaint can't even talk about it. ... And if the decision is against taking action, nobody, nobody is ever going to know that the complaint was made. And the person who made the complaint is going to be muffled."

Bock said the Senate needed to take time to develop balanced rules. "What we need is a statutory change, not some window-dressing rules that .. instead of opening up the process ... make it much more concealed and hide it from the public eye, and hide it from the media, so that nobody may ever know that there was a complaint and what the complaint was." He said, "It's a bad rule. It weakens what we've got." He called for establishment of an independent ethics commission, outside the Legislature, as 41 other states  have.