In Albany, Those Who Might Address Ethics Meet Rarely and Offer Less; New York Times, 1/19/16

Vivian Yee, New York Times; In Albany, Those Who Might Address Ethics Meet Rarely and Offer Less:

"In the Senate, the Ethics Committee’s last recorded hearing came more than six years ago, in June 2009, when John L. Sampson was its chairman. Mr. Sampson, a Democrat from Brooklyn, is no longer the chairman, nor is he a senator: He was convicted last year of obstructing a federal investigation into whether he had embezzled state funds.

The committee has not even met as a group in at least several years, a hibernation that has lasted through Republican leadership, Democratic leadership, power-sharing leadership and more than a dozen scandals over lawmaker misbehavior.

“It is a body bent on self-protection,” said Susan Lerner, executive director of Common Cause New York, a government watchdog group, referring to the Legislature. “And so you have two different committees in two different houses bent on self-protection.”"