by Mary Steurer and Jacob Orledge, North Dakota Monitor

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the North Dakota Monitor. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week.

Ever since North Dakota voters created an ethics watchdog agency seven years ago, dubious lawmakers have pushed back against giving it power to actually keep an eye on state officials.

That was true in the session that just ended, as legislators shut down many requests from the Ethics Commission, keeping the agency on a modest budget and rebuffing measures that would have given it more latitude in its investigations.

The offices of the governor and attorney general also argued during the session that the state constitution does not permit the commission to create or impose penalties for ethics-related violations.

“I was hopeful that the tide was turning,” said Rep. Karla Rose Hanson, a Democrat from Fargo and member of the Appropriations Committee, which worked on the commission’s budget. “But my general perspective is that the legislative body as a whole, specifically the majority party, is very hostile to the Ethics Commission and their work.”

North Dakotans, fed up with what they saw as ethical lapses by public officials, voted in 2018 to amend the state constitution and create the Ethics Commission. The amendment set rules for public officials and empowered the commission to both create more rules and investigate alleged violations related to corruption, elections, lobbying and transparency.

North Dakota was one of the last states to establish an ethics agency and since then, the commission has struggled to fulfill its mission, the North Dakota Monitor and ProPublica reported this year. The amendment left some ambiguity about the commission’s role and whether it can enforce ethics laws, leading to ongoing disagreements about how it operates.

State leaders’ actions this year further hamstrung the agency at a time when public officials across the country have been working, in various ways, to reverse or........

© ProPublica