THE RHODE ISLAND Ethics Commission is appealing the Superior Court’s dismissal of the conflict-of-interest case against former Senate President William Irons. Superior Court Judge Francis Darigan has ruled that the Ethics Commission’s charge against Senator Irons, debating and voting on legislation that helped “to obtain financial gain for CVS, his business partner,” cannot be prosecuted.

Judge Darigan’s reasoning is that the official lawmaking activities of state legislators, regardless of their motivation, are protected by the state constitution’s “speech-in-debate” immunity clause, which is intended to prevent interference in the legislative process by non-legislative branches of government.

Beyond the specifics of the case under consideration, the Ethics Commission is concerned about the implication that unmistakably flows from the Irons decision, that no ethics rules at all can be applied to the official acts of lawmakers. A body no less esteemed than the U.S. Supreme Court has also questioned the absoluteness of legislative immunity and — you may be surprised to learn — come to an answer very different about its scope than Judge Darigan has. In light of the importance of precedent to our legal system, the Irons ruling needs to be re-examined with this in mind.

The Rhode Island Ethics Commission derives its authority from a constitutional amendment passed in 1986, ostensibly making “all elected and appointed officials” in state and local government subject to its jurisdiction. Judge Darigan has decided that the word “all” used in the ethics amendment cannot reasonably be interpreted to mean “all,” because if it did, legislators would be deprived of the speech-in-debate immunity also written into the state constitution.

But in constructing his opinion, Judge Darigan extended the scope of speech-in-debate immunity beyond any limit that has been conclusively established by the U.S. Supreme Court. The Rhode Island courts (as noted in the Irons opinion) look to two key Supreme Court cases for guidance on speech-in-debate immunity issues: United States v. Johnson and United States v. Brewster.

In the 1966 Johnson decision, the Supreme Court held that the U.S. Constitution’s version of speech-in-debate protection disallowed the prosecution of legislators under “general criminal statutes” for any of their floor activities. However, in that same ruling, the court expressly left open the possibility of prosecuting “legislative acts or motivations” if the prosecution was “founded upon a narrowly drawn statute passed by Congress in the exercise of its legislative power to regulate the conduct of its members.” Six years later, in the Brewster decision, the Supreme Court reiterated its Johnson reservation, again declaring the question of whether legislators could be prosecuted under narrowly drawn statutes, specifically intended to regulate their conduct, to be an open one.

Had there been no further developments concerning ethics laws between the Johnson and Brewster decisions and the Irons case, the question of whether legislators could be made subject to narrowly constructed ethics regulations might still be considered unresolved. But there was a development, the aforementioned 1986 ethics amendment, that cannot be ignored.

In the American system of governance, constitutional amendments are the most authoritative sources that exist, outranking statutes passed by legislators and even the opinions of judges. Constitutional amendments resolve ambiguities in the law just as decisively — actually more decisively — than judicial opinions do. So when the people of Rhode Island amended their state constitution to establish a body with the singular, narrow purpose of creating and enforcing ethics rules, they settled the questions of if and how rules regulating official lawmaking activities could be made and did it using the most decisive mechanism of government possible. No conflict with the speech-in-debate immunity clause was created by the addition of the ethics amendment to the state constitution, as the amendment and the commission it empowered filled a void regarding the interpretation of legislative immunity that had intentionally been left open by the highest court in the land.

Given that the U.S. Supreme Court has never found a constitutional prohibition against the application of narrowly tailored ethics laws to legislators to exist in the past, the Rhode Island courts cannot go back and find one now. No judge has the authority to alter the straightforward meaning of a constitutional amendment by referring to a precedent that never was.

For these reasons, it is the unambiguous duty of the Rhode Island Supreme Court to overturn the lower court’s flawed Irons decision.

Carroll Andrew Morse is a contributor to Anchorrising.com, an online forum for the discussion of local, state and national public-policy issues.