To paraphrase Richard Nixon, “You’re not going to have JCOPE to kick around any longer."

New York state’s much-maligned ethics board, the Joint Commission on Public Ethics, will be replaced on July 8 by a new “Commission on Ethics and Lobbying in Government."

The question is, the name may have been changed, but will it still be dysfunctional? 

Rachael Fauss, senior research analyst at Reinvent Albany, a group dedicated to government transparency and accountability, told Capital Tonight that the new board is slightly better designed than JCOPE: It has fewer members (11 rather than 14), but good government groups still don’t think it’s independent enough.

“Folks may remember that the governor proposed a body in her executive budget that would have been appointed by law school deans. We supported that as an important step forward,” Fauss said. “But unfortunately, what we ended up with in the budget was a commission where the law school deans will vet the candidates, but the commission is still appointed by the elected officials.”

During JCOPE’s tenure, critics loudly derided the group’s unwillingness to pursue any whiff of corruption in the upper echelons of state government. According to Fauss, the law school deans will only be able to determine if the new commission’s candidates are qualified and have the right background and expertise.

“Unfortunately, the elected officials are still the ones who are ultimately making the decision about who to send to the law school deans,” Fauss explained.

The good news? According to Fauss, the new ethics commission should function a little bit better.

“There’s not going to be those supermajority rules where either a political party or a branch of government can block investigations from moving forward,” Fauss said. “It’s simple majority voting.”