This is an opinion column.

One Alabama lawmaker wants to gut the state ethics law and replace it with a new one.

He’d do better to follow the law we’ve got.

Alabama’s ethics laws don’t only limit lobbyists from plying lawmakers with free dinners and trips to the beach. They also require transparency from public officials, too.

If a state lawmaker, for instance, does business with a county government, he has to keep a copy of his contract on file with the Alabama Ethics Commission, where people can find it.

But when I went looking for one such contract this week, it wasn’t there.

State Rep. Matt Simpson, R-Daphne, should have filed that contract almost a year ago. Instead, he’s tried to rewrite the law so he’d never have to disclose such things in the first place. Nor would anybody else.

Simpson’s bill doesn’t only loosen restrictions on gifts between lobbyists and lawmakers. It also deletes important disclosure requirements from the law.

It takes transparency and makes it opaque.

Maybe it’s true, you don’t have to break the law when you make the law, but for that to work, those things have to happen in a certain order.

And Simpson got something backward.

Under the law today, when public officials enter into contracts with public bodies, including state, county or municipal governments, they have to say so. They must disclose that to the Alabama Ethics Commission and send the commission copies of the contracts within 10 days.

Suppose you were a county commissioner in Autauga County, but your day job was selling tractors. If you sold a tractor to the City of Prattville, you’d have to let the Ethics Commission know what sort of tractor it was and how much the public paid for it. The Ethics Commission then puts that information on its website where the public can find it. If the public paid $1 million for one tractor, there’s a place people see find that.

It’s useful stuff, transparency.

Which was why it was aggravating when I went looking for one of Simpson’s contracts. Simpson is a lawmaker from Baldwin County, but he also works under contract as an assistant district attorney in Mobile County.

But when I went to the commission’s site, that contract wasn’t there.

I asked the commission where it was. They told me they didn’t have it, but they did have two older contracts for Simpson’s legal work with Spanish Fort. I had already found those.

So this wasn’t a matter of Simpson not knowing the law existed. He had followed it before.

I called Simpson to ask him whether he had sent the contract to the commission, as the law required.

“I’m not sure whether they got the contract or not,” he said.

Simpson wanted me to understand he had clearance from the attorney general and ethics to take two public jobs at the same time, which I already knew. He seemed to misunderstand the question, so I asked it again. Did he file it?

“I’m not sure,” he said. “I don’t know that I have. I can’t say that I have.”

He, again, tried to defend having two public jobs at the same time and said he had permission.

That’s not the question, I told him. The question was did he follow the law requiring him to send a copy of the contract to keep on file?

“I’ll be happy to send it to them,” he said.

I told him I wasn’t going to hide the ball: It’s odd that someone who’s trying to rewrite the ethics law doesn’t seem to be in compliance with the ethics law right now.

“I’ll be happy to send it to them,” he said again.

Simpson has argued before that the Alabama ethics law is complicated and confounding, but there are many lawmakers who manage to comply with the disclosure requirement without apparent trouble.

State Sen. Sam Givhan, R-Huntsville, regularly lets the commission know when his law firm has taken on public entities as clients.

Lt. Gov. Will Ainsworth has filed contracts with the Von Braun Center in Huntsville where he’s hosted hunting and fishing expositions.

State Sen. Gerald Allen, R-Tuscaloosa, sends the commission copies of invoices when he sells meat sticks and cookie dough to schools for their fundraisers.

In the past, I’ve been hard on Allen. But Allen has proved up to the task, and if he can do it, anybody can.

But not the guy trying to rewrite Alabama’s ethics laws.

Last week, Alabama Ethics Commissioner Stan McDonald revealed he had given campaign donations while a commissioner — something prohibited by the law. McDonald this week admitted he had made a mistake and resigned from the commission.

Simpson seized on McDonald’s goof and called McDonald a felon on talk radio.

When I spoke with Simpson on Thursday, he seemed much less concerned with his own mistake.

Within about 15 minutes of my phone call with Simpson, he sent me a copy of his contract, which was signed May 26, 2023. The contract is about six sentences long, short on specifics, but for up to $40,000 per year.

He also sent the contract to the commission — 311 days late.

If his bill passes the Alabama Senate, he’d never have to file at all.

Alabama’s ethics laws are important. They restrain special interest groups trying to buy favor from lawmakers, they put a check on double-dipping by public officials and they give the Ethics Commission authority to police public officials.

But they also create windows through which we can see what our officials are doing.

It’s bad enough when we have to ask Simpson to open the blinds.

Simpson’s bill would brick that window shut.

Kyle Whitmire is the 2023 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for commentary. Subscribe to his weekly newsletter, Alabamafication.