In the race to unseat Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.), three men are in a contest for the GOP nomination: Rep. Mike Collins (R-Ga.), Rep. Buddy Carter (R-Ga.), and former football coach Derek Dooley. Collins has a commanding lead in the polls thus far, along with a significant war chest.
Carter is now dealing with some ethics questions relating to his time in the Georgia State Senate. Legislation he introduced a dozen years ago was fraught with conflicts of interest, which a Fox 5 Atlanta I-Team investigation uncovered.
My Townhall colleague Amy Curtis reported:
In 2014, while a state senator, Carter faced questions about Senate Bill 408, a bill he introduced. Industry experts said the legislation would directly benefit Carter and the three pharmacies he owned at the time.
According to that Fox5 I-Team investigation, the bill was "complicated with language about pharmacy benefit managers and maximum allowable costs."
The investigation said pharmacy benefit managers who administer prescription plans for insurance companies often negotiate the price consumers paid for drugs. This bill, Fox5 said, would have put restrictions on those benefit managers must do before they set that price.
Carter admitted that someone other than a pharmacist should have authored the legislation, but he took it up because it was coming up close to the deadline. However, State Senate ethics guidelines say that "Senators and Senate staff shall refrain from using government positions to attain personal financial gain."
Related: Why Won’t Jon Ossoff Condemn Hasan Piker?
The bill didn’t make it out of committee, and Carter won election to Congress that November. Ethics issues followed Carter to Capitol Hill. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported in 2016:
U.S. Rep. Buddy Carter is under scrutiny for co-sponsoring legislation that could benefit his pharmacy business.
A report by Fox 5 Atlanta questioned whether the Savannah Republican, a licensed pharmacist who owned pharmacies in south Georgia before he was elected in 2014, had a conflict of interest.
Carter, who transferred his pharmacies to his wife, was the only pharmacist in Congress before November's election and a vocal advocate of the pharmacy lobby's top issues.
He backed measures that would give seniors on Medicare more access to prescription drugs at their pharmacies and another that would give pharmacists "provider status" to expand their scope of practice.
Carter told Dale Russell the legislation was already written by other lawmakers before his election, and that the House Ethics Committee gave him verbal approval for his role.
Carter sought a coveted position on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which — shocker — regulates pharmacies.
“The committee is one of the last remaining legislative powerhouses on Capitol Hill, with a wide jurisdiction over health care, energy, manufacturing, and telecommunications,” the AJC explained in 2016. “Big donors tend to come with it.”
“It’s common for members of Congress with specific professional expertise to join the Capitol Hill committees that oversee the industries in which they once worked,” the report continued. “The House Ethics Committee allows lawmakers to vote on legislation that could benefit their industry, but not on anything that would directly benefit themselves.”
A 2017 ethics complaint alleged that Carter accepted illicit contributions by keeping his state Senate campaign account open after he ran for the House. Carter dismissed the complaint as a partisan hit job, but ethics rules bar candidates from “transferring money between state and federal campaign accounts.”
Republican voters should view these choices soberly: an ethics-challenged politician in Carter, a failed football coach who didn’t vote for Donald Trump but seeks his approval now in Dooley, or a solid conservative warrior in Collins. It’s a no-brainer in a crucial, must-win race.
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