Job Offer Might Be Ethical Problem for Nevada’s Republican Gubernatorial Candidate Sandoval

All the big kids know it — both political parties engage in back-room deals for everything from dogcatcher to cabinet posts to influence the outcome of elections. It’s called politics, people.

Much political hay has been made by the GOP over the Obama administration’s alleged offer of a White House position to U.S. Rep. Joe Sestak (D-Penn.) in exchange for his dropping out of a close Senate primary race to boost his opponent’s chances of winning, which supposedly were better than Sestak’s. The job, if indeed offered, was not accepted, and Sestak went on to win the primary.

The GOP, of course, howled for Rahm Emanuel’s and President Obama’s heads, drawing parallels with disgraced Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s attempts to sell Obama’s empty Senate seat to the highest bidder.

But the Republican Party apparently has been holding its own version of a political job fair, though its ethical problems might be worse than your typical smoke-filled-room wheeling and dealing, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal:

A short paragraph buried deep in an article published last weekend by Politico caught the attention of sharp-eyed critics of Republican gubernatorial candidate Brian Sandoval.

It was an article about the Republican Party’s efforts to field a more diverse slate of candidates and mentioned that “leaders of the Republican Governors Association, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour and executive director Nick Ayers, met and called” Sandoval in an effort to recruit him to challenge incumbent Gov. Jim Gibbons.

The line seemed to contradict Sandoval’s assertion when he entered the race in September that “nobody recruited me” to leave his lifetime appointment as a federal judge to challenge Gibbons.

It also piqued the interest of Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington, who has criticized Sandoval for engaging in political activity while still a judge, something Sandoval is adamant he didn’t do.

“These kind of meetings suggest he was engaged in a lot of political activity,” Sloan said.

Somebody’s in trouble at right-leaning Politico for not burying that paragraph deep enough, and somebody at the Review-Journal should be given a raise for actually reading that far into a Politico article.

Sandoval claims he followed guidance given by the Ninth Circuit — guidance he says he sought prior to coming to a decision about whether to resign the bench and run for governor and that he did not discuss the decision with the Republican Governors Association before he retired. The politico article would seem to contradict that. At least there’s enough murkiness to cloud the ethical waters.

It’s one thing to ask a fellow party member to step aside in a race that the party believes should be run by another candidate and be offered a consolation prize. It’s quite another to talk politics when one sits on the federal bench.

The whole point might be moot, say experts, because Sandoval is no longer subject to the ethical constraints of the Ninth Circuit because he retired, regardless of his actions before he left the bench. Hmmm, sounds like Sestak’s alleged job offer is a similar kind of moot point — if it was offered, he didn’t take it and he won the primary. End of controversy.