Jeff E. Schapiro column: Elevating a consumer watchdog

Hours before lawmakers returned to the state Capitol for their spring session, Dick Saslaw welcomed deep-pocketed visitors: the head of giant payday lender Advance America, the company's chief lobbyist and its fixer in Richmond.

The trio told the Senate Democratic boss that the company had found a legal way to -- and would -- bypass profit-cutting restrictions Saslaw won last winter, perhaps as penance for his status as an industry defender and major beneficiary of its campaign cash.

The lender's latest defiance, as a slap at legislators and a slight to customers, might intrigue Ted Morrison.

He is a recently retired member of the State Corporation Commission, the agency that polices Virginia business. In a road-to-Damascus moment spanning several years, Morrison has concluded the state should pursue a path it avoided 40 years ago: a separate, stand-alone agency as consumer watchdog.

Morrison, an SCC judge for 19 years, resisted such a proposal as a Democratic delegate from Newport News. A cause célèbre of populist Henry Howell, it surfaced during the 1969 debates over a rewrite of the state constitution. It went nowhere.

No surprise. While consumerism accelerated in the outside world, the Brigadoon that is Virginia affirmed the special bond between business and government.

The best this state would do came in 1970, when a law designated the attorney general's office -- then held by Democrat Andy Miller, a gubernatorial and, later, Senate wannabe -- the eyes and ears of consumers. Within the office, only nine lawyers serve in such roles.

It's not enough, says Morrison. He has warned, for example, that consumers will be hurt by the deal restoring some regulation of electric utilities. It was brokered on GOP gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell's watch as attorney general.

"I made a mistake," said Morrison. "A lot of us made a mistake. The legislature should have created an independent, politically insulated, well-funded agency to represent the interests of consumers before state agencies. The problem you have with the attorney general is that it's a political office, advocating for consumers against big-money corporate interests."

Big-money corporate interests that pump millions into the campaigns of attorneys general -- Democrats and Republicans -- whom Morrison describes as "governors in-waiting."

The Division of Consumer Counsel handles more than high-profile issues. That would include proposed rate hikes by monopolistic electric utilities or requests by telecoms to junk copper-line phone grids for lucrative broadband networks.

But the division also could intervene, say, before the arm of the SCC that oversees payday lenders, the Bureau of Financial Institutions. And the SCC, unbidden, may yet set restrictions on Saslaw's visitors.

As for attorney general as consumer counsel, it's up to the office's elective -- and presumably politically ambitious -- occupant to decide how, when and where to do the people's bidding or pass off a sop to a corporation as in Virginia's best interest.

An independent consumer advocate would be spared such a choice, in part because it would have broad discretion, presumably exercised in a transparent setting, to intervene -- or not.

Said Morrison: "It's basic fairness, through an adversarial system that's on the up and up."

Contact Jeff E. Schapiro at (804) 6496814 or . Watch his video column Thursdays on TimesDispatch.com. Listen to his analysis Fridays at 8:33 a.m. on WCVE radio (88.9 FM).