Nicholas Kusnetz stories from The Center for Public Integrity

Controversy ensnaring governor raises new questions about Virginia laws

2013-05-08T10:36:52-04:00

A series of revelations and stinging media reports about Virginia Gov. Robert McDonnell’s relationship with a corporate executive is bringing new attention to the state’s forgiving accountability laws — a subject highlighted last year by the State Integrity Investigation.

The root of the uproar is a $15,000 catering tab for the wedding of McDonnell’s daughter back in 2011, quietly paid by Jonnie Williams Sr., the CEO of Star Scientific, a Glen Allen, Va.-based dietary supplement company. Now the news, first reported in late March by the Washington Post, is dominating conversation in the state’s political circles and raising questions about Virginia’s liberal allowances for gifts to politicians: there is no limit.

Through a series of reports, the Post has detailed a close relationship between Williams and McDonnell’s family. Three days before the wedding, McDonnell’s wife, Maureen, flew to Florida to promote Star Scientific’s new product at a gathering of scientists and investors. Three months later, the company held its launch party for the product at the governor’s mansion. The McDonnells have also vacationed at Williams’ home, flown on his corporate jet and received more than a hundred thousand dollars to the governor’s campaign and PAC.

Published reports indicate that federal officials are interested, but the relationship may have stayed entirely within the bounds of Virginia’s ethics laws. The main question is whether McDonnell should have disclosed the $15,000 catering gift. He has said it was a present to his daughter (while Virginia officials must report any gift over $50, money given to family members is not subject to disclosure). The Post unearthed documents showing that the governor signed the catering contract and that an overpayment to the caterer was returned to Maureen McDonnell.

Whether or not the governor violated any rules or laws, the controversy says more about the laxity of Virginia’s ethics laws, according to John McGlennon, chairman of government department at the College of William & Mary.

“The ironic aspect of it is that because Virginia’s ethics regulations are so loose, relatively few people have actually run afoul of them,” McGlennon said. “They exempt so much, they don’t impose limits or really restrict the source of either contributions or gifts, that it’s pretty hard to run afoul of the law itself.”

As the State Integrity Investigation’s summary for Virginia points out, the allowance for unlimited gifts is just the beginning. The project is a state-by-state ranking of government transparency and accountability released last year by the Center for Public Integrity, Global Integrity and Public Radio International. Virginia is one of nine states without an ethics commission and one of four without limits on campaign contributions. In fact, Virginia’s ethics laws are among the least restrictive in the nation, a dubious distinction that helped place it 47^th out of 50 states with a grade of F.

Due to the paucity of oversight, McGlennon said it’s unlikely that any government body will investigate whether McDonnell violated state laws by failing to disclose the gift for the catering bill. “There’s very little other than self-policing,” he said. “Unless you see some smoking gun, you just take people’s word for it.”

Without an ethics commission or other oversight body, the task of investigating falls to law enforcement, which rarely results in much action, he said.

Last week, the Post and the Associated Press reported that the FBI is now looking into whether McDonnell gave any special dispensation to Star Scientific or to Williams. The inquiry is an outgrowth of an investigation into some of the company’s securities transactions.

McDonnell has denied doing any favors for the company in return for the gifts.

The scandal has reached into the governor’s cabinet as well. In April, Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, who is running for governor on the Republican ticket this year, amended his own disclosure forms to include gifts from Williams dating back to 2009. Secretary of the Commonwealth Janet Vestal Kelly amended her disclosure reports to include travel gifts from Star Scientific and the South Carolina Republican Party.

McDonnell and Cuccinelli each said they would be open to tightening the state’s disclosure laws to require reporting of gifts to family members. In response to the scandal, Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic candidate for governor, has said he would propose limiting gifts to $100 per donor. The episode has led several local newspaper editorial boards, including the News Leader and The Daily Progress, to call for more robust gift rules. In an editorial last month, the Post said the lack of disclosure for gifts to family members is a “whopper” of a loophole that enables “secret cash payments” to public officials.

IMPACT: Georgia governor signs bills limiting gifts from lobbyists

Georgia,United States — 2013-05-07T06:06:01-04:00

Gov. Nathan Deal brought Georgia in line with nearly every other state in the nation Monday by signing into law the state’s first restrictions on lobbyists’ gifts to lawmakers. Deal’s action puts in place the first major piece of ethics reform Georgia has passed in decades.

Until now, lobbyists in the Peach State had been free to lavish legislators with gifts and junkets of any size. But starting next year, they’ll be forbidden from spending more than $75 per gift.

The previous lack of gift rules was one of many reasons why Georgia ranked dead last a year ago in the State Integrity Investigation, a data-driven ranking of state government accountability and transparency carried out by the Center for Public Integrity, Global Integrity and Public Radio International. In addition to its overall grade of F, Georgia received failing grades in the specific categories of lobbying disclosure and legislative accountability.

“Our success as leaders of Georgia depends heavily on the public’s ability to trust us,” Deal said in a statement after signing the gift ban along with a second bill that deals with campaign finance reporting, primarily at the local level. “Together, these bills constitute a major step in improving ethics, trust and transparency in our state.”

While advocates of tighter ethics laws hailed the legislation as a step in the right direction, the gift cap bill contains several exceptions they believe substantially weaken the provision.

“It’s like you’re starving for a meal and somebody gave you a saltine cracker,” said William Perry, executive director of Common Cause Georgia, an advocacy group.

The bill permits lobbyists to pool their gifts, allowing three colleagues to jointly buy a dinner worth $200, for example. Lobbyists can also continue to shower committees and other group events with gifts of any size, and they can open their wallets to spend freely on travel for lawmakers as long as it is within the country and related to legislators’ official duties. The measure also makes it easier for lawyers to advocate for specific issues without registering as lobbyists, Perry noted.

“It’s chock full of loopholes,” he said.

The bill was the culmination of three years of work by a coalition of liberal and conservative activists, including Common Cause Georgia and Tea Party groups, called the Georgia Alliance for Ethics Reform. State Sen. Josh McKoon, a Republican, had also pushed the slate of reforms. The campaign met with little success until last year, when local news coverage and the release of the State Integrity Investigation pushed ethics reform on to the public agenda.

Last summer, the alliance placed non-binding referenda on primary ballots asking voters whether they supported a limit on lobbyist gifts. The measure won approval from 87 percent of Republicans and 73 percent of Democrats, and a gift cap quickly became a major issue in this year’s brief legislative session, which ended in March.

In January, on the first day of the session, the Senate passed a rule covering only the upper chamber that imposed a $100 gift cap. The leadership in the House then developed its own legislation, which initially included an outright ban on lobbyists’ gifts. But the bill contained several exceptions to the ban, and to the outrage of many Tea Party leaders, broadened the definition of who is a lobbyist in a way that would have required volunteer, citizen activists to register. The final bill is a compromise measure hashed out between the two chambers. The language was rewritten to address the concerns of citizen advocates about the definition of a lobbyist, but it still includes many exemptions to the cap.

Andre Jackson, editorial editor at the Atlanta Journal Constitution, criticized the legislature for waiting until the last minute to work on a compromise. “There was no justifiable reason why slapdash, last-second, basement-room dickering should have been employed,” he wrote in a blog post after the legislature passed the final measure in March. “As a result, what we ended up with, frankly, stinks.”

Debby Dooley, state coordinator for the Georgia Tea Party Patriots, said she’d like to see a limit to the gifts each legislator can receive each year. Advocates would also like to restrict spending on travel.

The final law also restores rulemaking authority to the Government Transparency and Campaign Finance Commission, which oversees ethics laws in the state. That authority had been stripped in 2009, hindering the body’s ability to collect fines and carry out other tasks.

Many of the issues that contributed to Georgia’s F grade from the State Integrity Investigation remain unchanged. Among advocates’ highest priorities are finding a stable source of funding for the ethics commission and creating an independent, grand jury-style body to investigate ethics complaints.

Still, many felt the measures signed Monday represented a step in the right direction.

“If you compare where we were March of last year, when we couldn’t have a hearing on an ethics bill, to this year where we got a bill passed, I think that’s tremendous step forward,” McKoon said. He said he plans to introduce legislation next session that would eliminate some of the exemptions in the gift cap, and would also like to improve financial disclosure for political appointees. “We have to make sure we don’t rest on our heels and say we’ve dealt with this issue.”

Florida enacts ethics and campaign finance package

Florida,United States — 2013-05-02T13:41:49-04:00

Florida Gov. Rick Scott signed a package of reform bills Wednesday night, bringing final approval for the first major overhaul of the state’s ethics laws in more than three decades. The two bills give significant new powers to the state’s ethics commission, extend a ban on lobbying for lawmakers after they leave office and rework the state’s campaign finance limits.

The new ethics legislation will address at least some of the weaknesses responsible for Florida’s overall grade of C- from the State Integrity Investigation, a state-by-state ranking of ethics and accountability released last year by the Center for Public Integrity, Global Integrity and Public Radio International. In the specific category of ethics enforcement, the Sunshine State had received an F.

The measures, which the legislature passed last week, had been top priorities for Senate President Don Gaetz and House Speaker Will Weatherford, both Republicans. Watchdog groups followed the bills’ passage closely and largely praised the ethics bill.

“There’s been a 36 year drought of meaningful ethics reform legislation going anywhere in Florida,” said Dan Krassner, executive director of Integrity Florida, a statewide watchdog group. “The fact that our state leaders prioritized ethics reform and dedicated time and resources to serious debate and policy improvements on the issues is historic.”

Some reform advocates and lawmakers criticized aspects of the bills, however, particularly the campaign finance provisions. Those provisions eliminate a type of committee—called committees of continuous existence— that candidates have used to raise unlimited funds before transferring the money elsewhere, obscuring the source of the cash. But the bill will allow another form of committee—so-called political committees—to raise unlimited funds instead. The only improvement, advocates say, is that the money will be spent by the same committee that raised it, making it easier to track who is paying for what. The measure will also require more frequent reporting from candidates.

But in exchange, the bill raises the limits on donations to candidates and leaves in place loose restrictions on campaign committees, allowing them to continue to raise and spend unlimited quantities of money and report their finances less frequently than candidates.

“They’ve kind of used a spigot to turn the gush of money to a new direction,” said Deirdre Macnab, president of the League of Women Voters Florida. Her group had urged Scott to veto the campaign finance bill. “At the end of the day, the Florida voter is no winner by any stretch.”

Candidates for statewide office will now be able to accept donations of up to $3,000 from individuals, with all other candidates able to accept up to $1,000. Previously, the limit for all candidates had been $500. Gov. Scott, who is up for reelection next year, had opposed raising the limits.

”No one has shown me a rational for raising these limits,” Scott told reporters after the legislature approved the bills last week. But when asked why he decided to sign the bill yesterday, Scott simply said that he’d listened to advice from across the state and determined the legislation was “in the best interests of the state.”

Proponents of the measure, including Krassner, have said that overall, the bill will improve campaign finance transparency.

The ethics bill, which passed both chambers of the legislature unanimously, reaches far and wide. It will prevent lawmakers from lobbying government for two years after leaving office. Previously, they were barred from lobbying the legislature but could petition the executive branch—an allowance the previous speaker of the house, Dean Cannon, is currently using. The measure gives additional powers to the ethics commission to collect unpaid fines and allows the body to initiate investigations based on referrals from law enforcement agencies or the governor’s office. Until now, the commission could investigate only after receiving a sworn complaint directly. It will also put into law a ban on voting on bills that could affect lawmakers’ finances.

But the measure contains a couple of provisions that watchdog groups say actually loosen oversight and transparency. Lawmakers who submit incomplete or inaccurate financial disclosures will now have 30 days to correct them before the ethics commission can issue a fine. “It’s what I would call a ‘get out of jail free’ card,” Macnab said.

The bill also allows legislators to put their investments in blind trusts. But Philip Claypool, who in 2011 retired as the executive director of the state’s ethics commission, said the provision fails to put in place standard safeguards that other states and the federal government use for such trusts. The result, he said, is that lawmakers will be able to drop investments such as real estate holdings in or out of the trusts in order to vote on a measure that may affect the investment, without having to disclose anything.

Despite the complaints, however, even the strongest critics of the reform package say the bill signed Wednesday will improve the laws on the books.

“These are some really good things,” Macnab said. “While it doesn’t go quite as far as we would have liked, we think it’s a good bill for Florida.”

Corruption case further sullies Albany's reputation

2013-04-03T16:14:20-04:00

A New York state senator and five other political officials have been named in a sweeping federal corruption case — the latest in a series of scandals that helped earn the Empire State a D grade from the State Integrity Investigation.

At the heart of the complaint unsealed Tuesday: federal prosecutors say Sen. Malcolm Smith, a Democrat from Queens, used a series of contacts in an attempt to bribe New York City Republican Party officials to approve his bid for mayor on the GOP ticket.

The case, which allegedly involved tens of thousands of dollars in bribes and agreements to secure state and city funds for development projects, highlights some of the endemic corruption problems that have plagued New York’s legislature in Albany, where politicians are frequently accused of exchanging cash for securing state funds and candidates exchange donations for political support. The image was reinforced by the State Integrity Investigation, a state-by-state ranking of accountability and transparency carried out last year by the Center for Public Integrity, Global Integrity and Public Radio International.

According to the complaint, Smith had ambitions to run for mayor of New York City, but wanted to run as a Republican. As a Democratic state senator, he needed support from the party to get on the ticket. The solution presented itself in the form of a New York real estate developer, who was cooperating with an undercover FBI agent in exchange for leniency on unspecified charges.

Over a series of meetings the developer and the FBI agent agreed to bribe two New York City GOP officials, Joseph Savino and Vincent Tabone, to garner their for support for Smith. In exchange, Smith would help secure state funds for a project of the developer’s. At one meeting, the developer told Smith it would cost, “a pretty penny,” to which Smith replied, “It’s worth it.” Savino allegedly asked for $25,000, Tabone for $50,000. On February 14, the agent met separately with Savino and Tabone in his car, handing Savino $15,000 in cash and Tabone $25,000.

The case also extends to several other local officials. Daniel Halloran, a New York City councilman, allegedly facilitated the meetings between the undercover agent and the GOP officials. Unrelated to the Smith dealings, however, he had also allegedly accepted tens of thousands of dollars in cash from the developer and the undercover agent in exchange for securing city funds to the developer. In one of their meetings where the developer handed over $7,500 in cash, Halloran said, “That’s politics, it’s all about how much,” adding, “that's our politicians in New York.”

The suit also includes charges of mail fraud against the mayor, Noramie Jasmine, and deputy mayor, Joseph Desmaret of Spring Valley, where the development was to be located, for their involvement.

The State Integrity Investigation, released in March 2012, detailed a long history of scandal in New York, including pay-to-play deals and political cronyism. The report gave New York a D- specifically in the category of political financing, with particularly weak grades for the financing of political parties.

'State Integrity Investigation' has blockbuster first year

2013-03-21T12:12:45-04:00

It’s been exactly one year since publication of the State Integrity Investigation, an unprecedented, data-driven analysis of transparency and accountability in all 50 states — and a lot has happened since. The project — a collaboration of the Center for Public Integrity, Global Integrity and Public Radio International, with cooperation from the Investigative News Network — has been quoted, praised, assailed or otherwise cited by hundreds of news outlets, good-government groups and legislators. The project was also a finalist for the prestigious Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting awarded by Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Clearly, the idea of measuring accountability and transparency in state government has touched a reformist nerve — and our package is continuing to resonate across the country.

Since the State Integrity Investigation was launched, reform efforts have been initiated in 16 states. Four of those states — Delaware, Iowa, Maine and Rhode Island — have passed laws or issued executive orders improving disclosure and access to public information. Lawmakers in seven other states have proposed a broad slate of measures that would strengthen ethics oversight, tighten campaign finance reporting and more.

The ongoing 2013 legislative sessions have seen a flurry of activity. The Florida Senate and Georgia House have each passed major ethics reform bills that would strengthen ethics enforcement and reign in spending by lobbyists and independent campaign committees. While watchdogs say the bills contain serious flaws, the measures nonetheless could represent the first major reform efforts in those states in decades. Significant legislation has also been introduced in South Carolina, Maine and North Dakota.

Where legislators have been slow to act, in some cases the executive branch has stepped in. Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee created a new online portal in January 2013 to display audits, contracts and other financial documents in searchable format. Chafee's office has been working with Global Integrity, a partner in the State Integrity Investigation, to bolster open government practices. In Oklahoma, Finance Secretary Preston Doerflinger said his agency had improved online access and added thousands of records to public websites over the previous 12 months.

Since release of the State Integrity Investigation, the Center has published a series of pieces highlighting systemic transparency issues that continue to plague state governments nationwide. You can read some of those, below. Visit the main project site for a wealth of data on transparency and accountability in each of the 50 states.

Conflicts of interest run rampant in state legislatures

New Mexico,United States — 2013-03-18T06:00:01-04:00

SANTA FE — On February 20, New Mexico’s House Energy and Natural Resources Committee gathered for one of its regular meetings in a drab room here at the capitol, a circular building known as the Roundhouse. On the agenda: a bill that would hike fees and penalties for energy companies drilling wells in the state.

The votes fell along party lines, with five Republicans lining up against the bill and the committee's Democratic majority voting to send the legislation to the House floor. The Republicans argued the bill would stifle business and cost jobs, and for one lawmaker, the issue hit particularly close to home. Rep. James Strickler spends most of the year running his own small oil and gas production company, JMJ Land & Minerals Co. The bill would directly affect his profits.

Strickler, a 58-year-old from the sparsely populated, gas-rich northwest corner of the state, speaks with a gentle western drawl. In an interview after the committee vote, he said the bill would put New Mexico’s regulations out of line with those in other states. Ultimately the bill was voted down on the House floor, and Strickler was among those voting ‘no.’ Over seven years in office, Strickler has been a staunch advocate for his own industry and has twice introduced legislation to reduce the amount of renewable energy that utilities must purchase. He has never recused himself from a vote on energy issues, he said, even when it directly affects his bottom line.

“I don’t think it’s a conflict of interest,” Strickler said. “I think it’s a blessing that a few of us have some understanding of that industry.”

New Mexico’s legislature meets for just 60 days each odd year and 30 days in even years. Lawmakers earn a $154 per diem payment while in session, but they receive no salary. These men and women are true citizen legislators, and unless they are retired or wealthy, they must find another way to earn a living. While all other states pay legislators at least a small salary, only ten state legislatures approach full-time status. The rest are part-time, and most lawmakers hold regular jobs the rest of the year.

As a result, situations like Strickler’s are the norm; insurance agents vote on insurance bills, doctors vote on health care bills and school administrators vote on education funding bills. Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan is also a partner at a prominent property tax law firm and has used his office to shape legislation and push state contracts that have sent millions of dollars to clients of the firm. Utah state Rep. Johnny Anderson, who runs for-profit day care centers, has pushed to change the state’s child care laws to benefit businesses like his; he told local reporters that all part-time legislators have conflicts. A 2010 review by the Deseret Morning News found that two out of three Utah legislators had introduced a bill that created a potential conflict with their private employment. In extreme cases, some lawmakers head groups that lobby the legislature, or even work as lobbyists themselves.

“It’s an absolute problem,” said Ben Bycel, a lawyer who used to run the ethics commissions in Los Angeles, and later, Connecticut. Bycel said many states do not pay legislators enough to discourage them from using their office for personal gain. In Connecticut, where Bycel worked from 2006-2007, he said many legislators’ outside employment was clearly a benefit of their public office. “Many of them were involved in situations [in which] they would not have had the job, they would not have kept the position, unless they were legislators. The reason why they were given the position was because someone up there thought they could do a good job for whatever industry it was.”

Advocates of part-time legislatures say they bring real-world experience to government and discourage the type of corrupt politics that can plague career politicians. But the system raises obvious conflicts of interest. States try to juggle these roles by requiring that lawmakers disclose their sources of income—which all but three states do—and by limiting what lawmakers can vote on—which 40 states do to at least some extent, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Generally, lawmakers are supposed to recuse themselves from votes on bills that would give them a direct financial benefit, but it is often up to the legislators themselves to make that determination.

Many states, however, lack the combination of clear rules and strong enforcement that might ensure conflicts do not become real problems. While 41 states have some form of ethics oversight body, a review last year found many of those bodies to be weak and ineffective. The review, a state-by-state ranking of ethics and accountability carried out by the State Integrity Investigation, a project of the Center for Public Integrity, Global Integrity and Public Radio International, gave grades of D or F to 28 of the state ethics agencies.

In New Mexico, there is no independent body for legislators to turn to for advice or to enforce the state’s ethics laws. While legislators are instructed not to use their office for private gain, lawmakers and government watchdogs say it is essentially up to individual legislators to decide whether a conflict exists, and whether they ought to recuse themselves from a vote.

Dede Feldman served as a Democrat in the legislature for 16 years before deciding not to run for re-election last year. She was a long-time advocate for creating an independent ethics commission, but she grew tired of legislative gridlock, and particularly frustrated with the lack of progress on ethics. She said lawmakers rarely recuse themselves, and that conflicts of interest have become so ingrained in the legislature that they rarely draw attention. “People have come to accept conflict of interest from legislators as the way we do business here,” she said.

Inside Stories

The Roundhouse consists of four circular hallways stacked on top of each other like doughnuts, with an open rotunda where the hole would be and offices lining the outside of the ring. The fourth floor hosts the governor’s office, which this winter featured an exhibit of the state’s prominent chile pepper industry that posed New Mexico’s basic existential question: Red or Green? The legislative chambers sit on the lowest level, underneath the floor of the rotunda. Lawmakers’ dress ranges from casual suits and blouses with New Mexico flare like the bolo tie, to the power-broker business suits common in Washington, D.C.

John Ryan sticks to the formal end of the scale. The Republican senator matches well-tailored suits with neatly parted chestnut hair. He’s represented parts of Albuquerque and its suburbs since 2005, and spends the rest of the year working as a federal lobbyist. His clients last year included a town in eastern New Mexico, a public water utility and two electric transmission and generation companies that operate in the state. According to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, they paid Ryan $240,000 last year to represent their interests in Washington.

Ryan is not registered to lobby in New Mexico, but he has voted on bills involving some of the same issues he lobbies for in Washington. Last year, he voted on a tax bond measure that funded dozens of projects across the state. One of items in the measure sent $278,000 to build a wastewater pipeline in Clovis, NM, which paid Ryan $40,000 last year. Ryan’s contract with Clovis cites a similar project on his to-do list. The same bond measure contained $210,000 for the Eastern New Mexico Water Utility Authority, which paid Ryan $80,000 last year, according to federal records. Over the past few years, Ryan voted on several other bills that either helped finance or otherwise affected his clients.

Ryan has recused himself from some votes, including a committee vote in February on a bill that would affect electric transmission projects, and he does not generally sponsor bills that would benefit his clients. But the various relationships have led some veteran statehouse-watchers to say Ryan has gone too far. Leanne Leith, the political and programs director for Conservation Voters New Mexico, said she thinks Ryan should not have voted on the tax bond measures, even though other projects were included in the bills. “Where is that line?” she said. “If you’re passing a bill where three of the four clauses affect your clients, but the fourth doesn’t, do you say you were voting on that fourth piece?”

Ethics experts outside the state have reacted more strongly. “That’s outrageous,” Bycel said, after having Ryan’s situation described to him. “Legislators should not also be lobbyists.”

Ryan declined repeated requests for an interview. His arrangement raised few concerns in New Mexico until recently, when the Santa Fe Reporter profiled a complaint against Ryan with the Secretary of State brought by Joe Carraro, who lost to Ryan in the 2012 general election. Carraro served in the legislature as a Republican for two decades until 2009. Five years ago, he was accused of conflicts himself after he requested appropriations for school field improvements that eventually led to contracts for an artificial turf company that had hired him as a consultant. Carraro denied knowing that the appropriations would eventually lead to work for the company.

The essence of Carraro’s complaint was that Ryan had run afoul of the state’s conflict of interest laws with his votes and that he was lobbying within the state without registering. In December, the Secretary of State’s office sent Carraro a letter saying that based on his allegations and a response from Ryan, it did not find “sufficient evidence” of a violation of ethics laws. Even after the report, some people in the Capitol do not seem surprised by the details of the case and point to several similar examples.

Sen. Daniel Ivey-Soto, a Democrat, is executive director of the New Mexico County Clerks group, and for years lobbied the legislature on the group’s behalf until he was elected last year. While he no longer lobbies, he still runs the group and has even sponsored a bill, which updates marriage license procedures, that he helped draft as a lobbyist.

“I am the most knowledgeable person in the building on this issue. I’ve been dealing with this for three years,” he said. “What sense does it make to say, oh, let me give this to somebody who doesn’t know a thing about it.”

Sitting in a meticulously organized office, with a map of the 15th Senate district on the wall, Ivey-Soto said his work as executive director is not evaluated on the basis of legislative success. He also said he would recuse himself from any bill that could affect his compensation.

Mark Moores, a hulking, former college football player now serving his first term in the Senate as a Republican, is also the head of the New Mexico Dental Association, which has its own legislative agenda. The group has lobbied against a bill this year that would expand the work of dental therapists, and Moores said he will vote on the measure and sees no conflict.

“I don’t have a financial interest in if that bill passes or not,” Moores said. Because he is not a dentist and has no practice, Moores said the bill poses no direct financial concern for him. “But I have more expertise in that area than anyone else in this legislature because I’ve studied it, I know the issue. And if people ask me questions about it, I’m willing to share.”

Viki Harrison, executive director of Common Cause New Mexico, said Moores should recuse himself from voting on the dental bill. But she pointed out that the vote is only a small part of the problem. “I’m going to tell you what happens in a citizen legislature. Other senators are going to look to him for direction because they just got slammed with a thousand bills in 30 days,” she said. “It’s not like every legislator has their own bill analyst to help them out.”

State by state

The situation is hardly exclusive to New Mexico. Ben Kieckhefer, a Republican state Senator in Nevada, is also the director of corporate communications for a Las Vegas law firm. In 2011, he told the Reno Gazette-Journal that he talks with the lobbyists at his firm so he knows what they are working on. "We need to make sure I have a clear understanding of what they're testifying on so I don't have a conflict of interest I don't know about,” he said.

Last year, the government watchdog group Integrity Florida examined lawmakers’ financial disclosure forms in that state and discovered that at least 11 legislators earned money from firms that lobby the legislature. Only two of the 11 reported potential conflicts of interest on votes, and only five listed their clients. Dan Krassner, the group’s executive director, said there were large inconsistencies in financial disclosure reports and that many were filed late or were not filed at all.

“Certainly, there’s an appearance that legislators and other officials that have clients are in a position to help their clients with little oversight,” Krassner said. He said the state’s conflict of interest rules are weak, and that financial disclosure is insufficient. “Too many officials are using their office for private gain.”

David Freel, who used to run Ohio’s Ethics Commission and now teaches ethics at Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business, said that working for a lobbying firm, while not banned in many states, lies at the edge of what is appropriate in a part-time legislature. “I think it creates an exceptional caution and risk signal to have a legislator be both a legislator and a lobbyist simultaneously,” he said. “Because then the question is, what is the separation?”

A fine line

The general rule of thumb in New Mexico and most states is that lawmakers ought not to vote on bills that affect them in particular, but that they are free to work on bills that affect an industry of which they’re a part. Most ethics experts say it’s difficult to write rules that are any more restrictive without having problematic side effects, such as precluding anyone except the independently wealthy from serving.

Alan Rosenthal, an expert in state government and legislative ethics at Rutgers University, said he’s in favor of banning dual office holding—when legislators hold a second public job such as sitting on an administrative board—and also supports preventing lawmakers from working as lobbyists or in other political fields. But he said overly restrictive rules would have unintended consequences. “The alternative there is to start trying to restrict the ability of legislators to participate because of where they earn their income,” he said. “The problem there is that you're limiting the representation that your constituency gets.”

The problem becomes complicated when a lawmaker, as is often the case, works in a field in which he has clients who deal with government contracts and regulation. “If he’s an insurance salesman, if he’s a lawyer, if he’s in any of these kinds of fields,” Bycel said, “you bet he’s going to have clients and customers who want something from him as legislator.”

Illinois’ House Speaker Michael Madigan is an extreme example. In a series of articles over the past few years, the Chicago Tribune reported on several cases in which Madigan, a Democrat known for his tight control of the legislature, pushed bills and contracts that reportedly steered millions of dollars to clients of his firm, Madigan & Getzendanner. In 2009, for example, Madigan helped secure $18 million in state funds for a highway interchange that a coalition of businesses had been promoting for years. Two of those businesses had hired his firm. In 2005, months after his firm was hired by a company that owns nursing homes, Madigan and the House made permanent a program that funded assisted living homes for the poor. The Tribune reported that the move unlocked millions of dollars in investment money for the company, Pathway Senior Living LLC, and allowed it to nearly double its number of facilities and collect tens of millions of dollars in additional federal and state funds.

One Tribune columnist called Madigan a “walking conflict of interest.” An editorial said that he had weakened bills affecting banks, nursing homes and pharmacies that had hired his firm, but noted there was no “smoking gun” indicating that Madigan had violated any ethics rules. “You don't need an ethics expert to deduce that something is very wrong in Illinois.”

Steve Brown, a Madigan spokesman, said none of the companies in question had hired Madigan’s firm in order to secure contracts or funds. He said that Madigan has not violated any laws, and that he complies with a personal code of conduct that says nothing he does in his public work will benefit him or his firm privately. “The most important thing is the end conclusion, that at no point did they demonstrate that Mr. Madigan used his pubic office for private gain,” Brown said.

Illinois’ Gov. Pat Quinn this year proposed explicitly prohibiting legislators from voting on issues where a conflict might exist. It’s unclear what exactly Quinn would qualify as a conflict, however, and a spokesman from his office did not answer specific questions on the proposal.

Maryland has a long history of similar dealings, said James Browning, regional director for state operations at Common Cause. In 2004, the organization reviewed votes and financial disclosures in Maryland and found that 50 legislators had sponsored 127 bills that affected their employers.

More recently, the state Senate censured Sen. Ulysses Currie last year for failing to disclose nearly $250,000 in consulting fees he earned from a grocery store chain, even as he helped the company win concessions with the state. Months earlier, a federal jury had acquitted Currie on charges stemming from the scandal; members of the jury said they felt Currie’s indiscretions fell short of criminal behavior. In the wake of the Currie scandal, Maryland lawmakers passed a bill requiring themselves to post some conflict of interest disclosure forms online, but they did not require that full financial disclosures be posted.

“The practice of pushing these bills to help your employer or yourself is pretty widespread,” Browning said, “and for the most part allowed under the rules.”

Broader perspectives

In many states, the concept of a full-time, professional legislature is a non-starter. In North Dakota and Texas, for example, lawmakers meet every other year. Many lawmakers in New Mexico say a citizen legislature brings a diverse group to the capitol with “real-world” experience.

“The writers of our constitution did not want a professional legislature,” said Moores, the first-term senator in New Mexico. “They wanted people coming in from the four corners of our state with different backgrounds.”

Robert Stern, who helped write California’s conflict of interest laws in 1974 and went on to work for the state’s ethics commission, said part-time legislatures bring a broader perspective to government and can actually reduce lawmakers’ reliance on campaign contributions. If legislators rely on other jobs for their incomes, he said, they may be more willing to alienate donors because serving in office is just one part of their professional life. Attempts to make legislatures full-time have gathered little support in Florida and Texas, and some people have pushed to shorten sessions in California, Michigan and Wisconsin.

But some experts and lawmakers say part-time legislatures harbor systemic flaws. Sen. Gerald Ortiz y Pino, an Albuquerque Democrat and retired social worker, supports giving New Mexico’s legislators a salary. He said the brief legislative sessions mean lawmakers do not have enough time to wade through a wave of more than a thousand bills introduced each session. The problem is compounded by the fact that they do not have staff to help analyze legislation. The situation creates reliance on lobbyists—and their gifts—to help lawmakers sort out the details of legislation, he said. Ortiz y Pino and others also argue that rather than broadening its scope, a part-time legislature actually limits who can serve, because most people cannot afford to take two months away from full-time jobs.

“Having a citizen legislature sounds good on the surface,” Ortiz y Pino said, but the problems associated with it are “enormous.”

Browning of Common Cause said the problem has grown worse as Congress has given greater discretion to the states over how to spend federal money through block grants. The move has shifted more work from Washington to state capitols, he said, but states have not kept pace by devoting more resources to their legislators. “If you consider how much is at stake, how much money is being carved up by budgets and in these committees and how little is being invested in these people in salaries and in resources,” Browning said, “it’s hard to argue that we’ve set up a system to get the best and the brightest and have them fight for their constituents.”

Conflicts of interest have simply become part of the system in many states, experts say, where legislators earn little pay and have no effective oversight. In New Mexico, disclosures are inconsistent and are not audited. And without an independent ethics commission, oversight and enforcement simply does not work, said Harrison of Common Cause New Mexico. People can submit complaints to the Secretary of State, which rarely pursues ethics investigations, or to a number of legislative committees. Those committees have received about half a dozen ethics complaints since 2005, but have not found probable cause in any of them. “From our perspective, there’s really very, very little ethics oversight, and there are very few rules,” Harrison said.

The same could be said for many other states, where ethics agencies remain weak and under-funded, if they exist at all. Experts agree that independent oversight and strong disclosure rules are critical to preventing conflicts, as is paying legislators an adequate salary. But even under the best laws, conflicts are an inherent part of the system —and that issue can’t be squared, certainly not at the Roundhouse. “In some ways it’s an indictment of part-time legislatures,” Browning said. “This will always be a problem.”

Florida Senate passes sweeping ethics reform package

2013-03-06T12:02:09-05:00

The Republican-controlled Florida Senate unanimously passed a landmark ethics reform package on Tuesday, the first day of the legislative session, setting the stage for what could be the first major changes to the state’s ethics laws in decades.

The bills would strengthen provisions that prevent lawmakers from immediately becoming lobbyists, expand the powers of the state’s ethics commission and require that financial disclosure reports be posted online.

"Public office is a public trust," Senate President Don Gaetz said in hailing the 40-0 vote. "This legislation means the Florida Senate is serious about ethics reform. Higher ethical standards is just one more difference between Florida senators and Washington senators."

But the measures also contain several changes that critics say would actually weaken existing laws.

“I think it would be a step forward in some ways but several steps backward in others,” said Philip Claypool, a lawyer who served as executive director of the Florida Commission on Ethics until retiring in 2011. “The net effect I don’t think would be progress.”

While the legislation allows lawmakers to place investments in a blind trust in an effort to prevent conflicts of interest, for example, it leaves out several safeguards contained in similar laws in other states and at the federal level, Claypool said.

The bills would also allow lawmakers who have filed erroneous or incomplete financial disclosure reports to correct the forms before the ethics commission can investigate, in essence preventing the body from fining officials for their transgressions.

“Basically, they can get away with paying even less attention to the accuracy of a report,” Claypool said.

Gaetz spokeswoman Katie Betta disputed the characterization that the bills loosen existing law. She said the legislation would strengthen the ethics commission by allowing it to receive referrals from other state agencies.

Currently, the commission can initiate an investigation only after receiving a sworn complaint.

Both Gaetz and Republican House Speaker Will Weatherford, both new to their leadership posts, have said that passing ethics reform is a top priority. The state received an overall grade of C- from the State Integrity Investigation, a state-by-state ranking of ethics and accountability released last year by the Center for Public Integrity, Global Integrity and Public Radio International.

House and Senate leaders do not agree on all the details of the bills.

While the Senate bill restricts how lawmakers can spend money from a type of campaign fund that legislators now use to solicit unlimited donations, legislation in the House would eliminate the committees altogether.

The House bill would also raise direct campaign contribution limits from $500 to $10,000 per person, a figure that Gaetz has said is too high. Ryan Duffy, a Weatherford spokesman, said he expects the House to begin work soon and to adopt a measure similar to the Senate package.

Dan Krassner, executive director of the watchdog group Integrity Florida, called the new legislation, “a mixed bag.” The Senate rushed the package through committees in an effort to pass it on the first day of the session, he said, but he’s hopeful the House may correct some of the problems identified by Claypool.

“Now that the bill is through the Senate it’s time for the House to remove provisions that protect officials who want to break ethics laws,” he said, “and instead ensure the bill protects the public.”

Georgia House approves ethics reform package

Georgia,United States — 2013-02-27T06:33:31-05:00

The Georgia legislature has taken a major step toward strengthening the state’s ethics laws by moving a package of reform legislation through the House. The two bills in the package would impose limits on gifts from lobbyists and restore powers to the state’s ethics enforcement agency, among other changes.

The measures, which are sponsored by Speaker David Ralston, attracted little opposition, sailing through the House on Monday with just four dissenting votes. But their fate in the Senate remains clouded. In January, the upper chamber adopted a $100 cap on lobbyist gifts in a rule change that does not apply to the House. Ralston told reporters on Monday that he would not negotiate on changing his proposed ban on gifts to match the $100 limit that the Senate enacted. While some senators have called for passing the House legislation unchanged, others have sounded more cautious.

“I’m sure several of us are going to sit down and talk about where we go from here,” Senate Ethics Chairman Rick Jeffares told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Neither Jeffares nor Ralston could immediately be reached for comment.

Some advocates for stronger ethics laws have criticized components of Ralston’s initiative. The more controversial of the pair of measures passed Monday would enact a blanket ban on lobbyist gifts, which currently have no limits. But the legislation carves out large exceptions to the ban by allowing gifts to committees and reimbursement for some travel expenses. The bill would also require many unpaid, citizen advocates to register as lobbyists, a move that drew fire from both liberal and conservative advocacy groups.

The bills are part of a growing movement in the legislature to increase transparency and reduce the risk of corruption in the state. Georgia ranked dead last and received an F grade last year from the State Integrity Investigation, a state-by-state ranking of accountability and ethics laws conducted by the Center for Public Integrity, Global Integrity and Public Radio International.

A coalition of reform groups has used the state’s poor showing to push for stronger laws. Last year, voters overwhelmingly supported two ballot questions that called for enacting limits on lobbyist gifts. A series of high-profile scandals also heightened voter awareness of the issue. In 2010, for instance, Ralston and his family went on a $17,000 trip to Europe paid for by high-speed rail lobbyists.

In a blog post written after the House voted on the reform package, William Perry, executive director of Common Cause Georgia, said that with the exceptions written into House bill, lobbyists still would be able to spend about $13,000 on a similar trip.

After Ralston proposed the reforms in January, Perry told the Center for Public Integrity that the package was, “an old political trick with a poison pill.” Perry said that while the bills include some worthy measures, such as restoring rule-making authority to the state’s ethics oversight body, the Senate is unlikely to pass the package as is.

The original proposal drew outrage from tea party groups because it included a new definition of who is a lobbyist to include unpaid advocates for a variety of causes. The final version was amended to address those concerns by reducing the fee for registration and exempting anyone who lobbies fewer than six days a year.

Kay Godwin, co-chairman of Georgia Conservatives in Action, said that even with the changes, the bill still discourages grassroots activism. “We have a first amendment right to voice our opinion,” she said. “You don’t send a message that we’re not wanted up here.”

Senate President Pro-Tem David Shafer last week told a University of Georgia panel that he was confident the two chambers would agree on a lobbyist gift restriction by the end of the session, which is not yet set but is expected to come before the end of April.

Emails show Florida GOP may have defied constitutional amendment

2013-02-06T06:00:01-05:00

Documents released this week appear to show that Florida legislative leaders worked with state Republican officials to manipulate redistricting efforts, in apparent defiance of a constitutional amendment that banned such coordination.

The documents, the contents of which were first described by the Herald/Times of Florida, were ordered released by a judge presiding over a suit against the state filed last year by both individuals and government watchdogs. That suit alleges that new boundary lines for both congressional and state Senate districts are illegal because they came about partly as a result of politically-driven activities forbidden by the amendment. Among the documents are emails between political consultants, the staff of Republican leaders and two state representatives discussing the new district lines.

In nearly any other state, the revelation would not have been a surprise. As the State Integrity Investigation detailed last year, politicians are free to draw new Congressional and state legislative district lines for partisan gain in most states.

But in 2010, voters in Florida approved changes to the state Constitution that prohibit legislators, who control the redistricting process in the state, from drawing lines to favor a particular party or incumbent. Redistricting is done every 10 years to redraw congressional and legislative districts to guarantee equal representation in light of new U.S. Census data.

Plaintiffs say the emails show a clear violation of the amendment. In one, a Republican lawmaker writes an email from his personal account to a campaign consultant hired by Republicans, asking, “What does this do to my district?” Another email, from another Republican consultant, announces a redistricting meeting that was to be held at the state GOP headquarters. Those scheduled to attend included several consultants as well as staff members of the House and Senate leadership. Other emails show the consultants discussing the maps and possible changes.

“These documents suggest very strongly that partisan motives were not only at work but helped develop the plan,” said Gerry Hebert, a lawyer representing the League of Women Voters, one of several plaintiffs.

In an initial, automatic review last year, Florida’s Supreme Court struck down the Republicans’ first attempt to draw new lines for the state Senate, but approved the current map. The plaintiffs quickly sued to challenge those districts, as well as the lines Republicans drew for Congress.

Katie Betta, a spokeswoman for Senate President Don Gaetz, declined to comment because the suit is still being litigated. House Speaker Will Weatherford issued a statement defending the newly drawn districts. “We are proud of those results and believe it was because of our transparency, openness and unwavering compliance with the law.”

The State Integrity Investigation gave Florida an A for redistricting, as part of a review of state government ethics and transparency. That rating was based primarily on the opportunity for public input, however, and did not grade whether or not political leaders were able to draw lines for partisan gain.

Justin Levitt, an expert in redistricting at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, said Florida’s constitution does not prohibit political parties and lawmakers from discussing the plans, but that Republicans will need to explain why they were discussing the topic. “It looks fishy,” he said, “and they’re going to have to come up with a pretty good reason why they were talking to the party.”

Georgia speaker wants new ethics rules - with a twist

2013-01-31T10:01:00-05:00

Georgia’s House Speaker says the ethics reforms he’s proposed this week could bring about a major shift toward cleaner government in the Peach State. But reform groups believe the initiatives may just represent politics as usual.

Speaker David Ralston introduced a bill that would ban gifts from lobbyists to lawmakers and restore the state ethics commission’s rule making authority, which the legislature stripped years ago. But the bill would also broaden the definition of who is a lobbyist to ensnare citizen volunteers, a move that has infuriated both liberal and conservative open-government advocates.

The bill requires nearly anyone who tries to influence a public official to register as a lobbyist, a step that requires hundreds of dollars in annual fees and as well as regular reporting of activities. It excludes constituents who make appeals to their own representatives. William Perry, executive director of Common Cause Georgia, said the language could theoretically include someone who posts a petition on a Facebook page, and that the definition’s constitutionality is questionable at best.

“I think it’s an old political trick with a poison pill,” Perry said. “You put forth this law that sounds great and makes you look tough on ethics laws and you put in something that no one will vote for.”

Ralston could not immediately be reached for comment.

The central piece of Ralston’s bill is a measure that would ban most lobbyist gifts to individual members of the legislature. Currently, Georgia is one of the few states to have no limit on such spending. The state Senate passed a rule earlier this month that enacted a $100 cap on each gift, and lawmakers have introduced bills that would put the cap into law. Ralston criticized the Senate rule as a “gimmick” and promised to go further.

“It’s going to be a different way of doing business around here,” Ralston told the Atlanta Journal Constitution after announcing his bill on January 29.

But critics say Ralston’s bill contains many of the same loopholes as the Senate rule. It would allow lobbyists to pay travel costs if they invite lawmakers to a conference. It also allows lobbyists to give to committees and subcommittees, which can consist of as few as one lawmaker. “You could appoint every legislator to a subcommittee of one and it basically takes the ban away,” Perry said.

Ralston’s bill would also restore rule-making authority to the Government Transparency and Campaign Finance Commission, the state’s ethics oversight body. The legislature removed this authority in 2009, and one result is that the agency has been unable to collect many late filing fees.

The Speaker filed a separate bill that would require additional campaign finance disclosures. But that measure would also effectively roll back some advances made in recent years on improving transparency of campaign finances in local elections, Perry claimed.

Georgia ranked last among 50 states in the State Integrity Investigation, a review of government accountability and transparency. The state’s poor showing contributed to a growing reform movement last year. Ralston’s proposals are just two of many ethics bills expected to be introduced this session, which opened January 14.

Perry said his group plans to present the State Integrity Investigations findings to a House panel today to press for amendments to Ralston’s bills. He said it is unlikely the Senate would pass the bills as they are currently written.

Package of bills seeks ethics reform in North Dakota

North Dakota,United States — 2013-01-29T14:43:23-05:00

Lawmakers in North Dakota have introduced a package of ethics reform bills that would revamp the state’s oversight of its politicians. Dubbed the Sunshine Act, the measures would create an ethics commission to investigate state officials and would tighten campaign finance reporting rules, among other changes.

Rep. Corey Mock, a Democrat, has been pushing for ethics reform unsuccessfully since entering office in 2009. But last year, Mock seized on the state’s poor showing in the State Integrity Investigation, which gave North Dakota an overall grade of F, and announced he would introduce several bills once the legislature reconvened, saying that he hoped the report would improve the chances of passing such initiatives. "The CPI study was an eye-opener," Mock told The Huffington Post in August.

In March, North Dakota received an F in eight of 14 categories from the State Integrity Investigation, which ranked state governments on transparency and accountability. The report, a collaboration of the Center for Public Integrity, Global Integrity and Public Radio International, placed North Dakota 43^rd out of 50 states. The lack of an ethics commission and lax campaign finance laws—each of which would be changed by Mock’s legislation—were chief among the reasons for the state’s poor showing.

Some lawmakers and independent observers in the state said the ranking missed the fact that a state with fewer than 700,000 people does not require the same level of complex and robust accountability laws as bigger states, such as Illinois.

“They don’t really realize sometimes that these small population states like ours, we’re really like a small town in a sense,” Jack McDonald, a media attorney and lobbyist, told the State Integrity Investigation last year. “So, in state government, everybody knows what everybody is doing … it would be very difficult to get away with anything in North Dakota.”

While the state has not been rocked by major ethics scandals, the Forum of Fargo-Moorhead, a North Dakota newspaper that first reported the bills, said the Sunshine Act has bipartisan support.

Lawmakers in Southeast call for ethics reform

2013-05-06T15:12:30-04:00

As lawmakers in three Southeastern states prepare for the 2013 legislative session, they’re finding bipartisan agreement on an unlikely agenda: ethics reform. Leaders in South Carolina and Florida have begun work that lawmakers and watchdogs say could lead to the states’ first meaningful reforms in decades. And in Georgia, proponents of stronger rules are rallying behind a slate of measures they hope may finally pass in what has long been a recalcitrant Legislature.

The initiatives all seek some regulation of money and influence. The proposals take aim at independent political spending, asset disclosure and gifts from lobbyists in an effort to bolster transparency and rein in the spiraling costs of running campaigns. In some cases the reforms could go deeper, as lawmakers try to attack the roots of corruption by strengthening ethics oversight and enforcement.

“There’s been a real sea change in terms of the atmosphere around ethics reform,” said Josh McKoon, a Republican state senator in Georgia, which ranked last among the states for corruption risk in 2012’s State Integrity Investigation —a collaboration of the Center for Public Integrity, Global Integrity and Public Radio International.

Lawmakers in several other states — Missouri and Idaho among them — have said they may push reform in the 2013 session. But nowhere does it appear as likely as in the Southeast, where several factors, including a series of scandals, have pushed the issue onto the public agenda. Good-government groups and legislators in each of three states have used their rankings in the State Integrity Investigation to argue for substantive changes. Georgia and South Carolina received failing grades, and Florida received a C-minus.

But critics caution that this isn’t the first time politicians in these states have called for change, and much of the talk could prove to be just that. Apart from a narrow rule change in Florida, policymakers have taken few actions beyond voicing grand but general commitments to reform and creating several commissions to examine the issue. Georgia’s movement is being pushed by second-term legislator McKoon, who failed to rally much support last session. And while observers in Florida and South Carolina say they fully expect legislators to cast votes on reform bills in this session, the long legislative process could still whittle them down to little more than weakened gestures.

South Carolina

It’s perhaps an understatement to say that South Carolina state government has had a bit of an image problem in recent years. First, in 2009 then-Gov. Mark Sanford absconded to Argentina on a romantic affair that eventually led to his paying a $74,000 fine to settle ethics charges. Last March, a state judge sentenced Lt. Gov. Ken Ard to five years’ probation and levied a $5,000 fine after Ard pleaded guilty to charges that he mishandled campaign money in the 2010 election. More recently, House Speaker Bobby Harrell has been accused of pocketing campaign funds by labeling them as reimbursements. And then there was the F from the State Integrity Investigation.

“A lot of those things have all generated a real push for some meaningful ethics reforms,” said GOP state Sen. Wes Hayes, who recently left his position as chairman of the Senate Ethics Committee to take a more senior leadership post. A recent poll found that a majority of South Carolinians support strengthening ethics laws.

In her State of the State address on Jan. 16, Republican Gov. Nikki Haley cited South Carolina's failing grade from the State Integrity Investigation as evidence of the need for reform.

"Every single one of us knows that's not good enough," she said, "that the people of South Carolina deserve better, and that is our responsibility—no, that is our obligation—to give it to them."

Four panels are holding hearings and readying recommendations for reform legislation: one appointed by Haley; one Senate committee led by Hayes; and two House panels, one formed by each party.

All four are likely to address campaign finance this session, which began January 8. As a result of a 2010 federal court ruling, South Carolina has no effective limits on independent expenditures. In the 2012 campaign, Hayes and other incumbents suffered withering attacks in television ads paid for by groups with money from anonymous donors, which led to a bipartisan consensus to address the gaps brought about by the court decision.

John Crangle, director of Common Cause South Carolina, said the abundance of unlimited, anonymous campaign spending through independent groups has driven up the cost of running for office. “There’s a lot of concern that ordinary people are just being frozen out of the process,” he said. “It’s the Wild West.”

Another top concern: ethics oversight. An independent Ethics Commission enforces the rules for many state officers, but lawmakers are not among them. The state constitution gives legislators the right to “punish its members for disorderly behavior.” Although there’s debate over whether this is an exclusive right, legislative committees have always handled ethics complaints against lawmakers. Crangle said this practice can lead to conflicts of interest. While the House Ethics Committee is charged with investigating the complaint against Harrell, for example, each of the Republicans on the committee has accepted donations from his leadership PAC. (This session, the House Ethics Committee will consist of five members of each party, rather than five Republicans and one Democrat, as it did last session.)

Some officials have proposed allowing an independent body to investigate ethics complaints for all branches of government. Investigators would then forward recommendations to either the House or Senate Ethics Committee — for complaints against legislators — or to the Ethics Commission — for everyone else — to get a final ruling. Such a system would lend a degree of independence to investigations without requiring an amendment to the state constitution.

Hayes said such a body could help alleviate the burden on the chronically underfunded Ethics Commission, which has seen its annual budget appropriation cut from $725,000 in 1999 to less than $323,000 last year. “You can pass laws till you’re blue in the face,” Hayes said, “but if you don’t have anyone to enforce them, it doesn’t really mean much.”

It’s unclear what shape such an independent body would take, though, or how it would be paid for. And it would likely face limits on what it could investigate, said Kenny Bingham, chairman of the House Ethics Committee.

One proposal, from the attorney general, calls for a public integrity unit comprising officials from five agencies, including the Ethics Commission. The unit would draw on existing funding to the agencies and therefore not require new revenue. It would not accept complaints, but would rely on legislative committees to pass on cases that they currently investigate on their own.

Another option would give the investigative power to the Ethics Commission. Cathy Hazelwood, general counsel for the commission, said it’s too soon to say what that would cost but guesses that it would require a minimum of two additional staff members, or at least $150,000 more a year. Crangle said that coming up with the money might be easier now that revenue has been increasing as the economy improves. Legislators have also proposed increasing registration fees for lobbyists, which together with other fees generate most of the commission’s budget.

But none of these steps go far enough, according to the editorial board of The State, one of South Carolina’s leading newspapers. In a December editorial, the paper argued that legislators must give up the power to sanction their peers: “That’s what will restore the public’s confidence that our legislators are working for the good of our state rather than the good of themselves.”

Haley has said she will endorse the recommendations of the panel she appointed — headed by two former attorneys general — whether or not she agrees with them. Hayes said the Senate committee will wait to learn that panel’s recommendations, which are expected in late January, before issuing its own. Lawmakers will then need to turn the recommendations into legislation.

“The big problem will be whether the General Assembly does anything about it,” Crangle said, adding that he doubts that Speaker Harrell will back meaningful reforms. “There’s going to be a hell of a lot of resistance.”

Harrell’s office did not respond to requests for comment. He has not spoken extensively on the issue but did comment for a press release that accompanied the announcement of the House committees in October. “These reforms and added transparency efforts will help ensure the public that our ethics laws are being followed and enforced,” he said, “making it much more difficult for members to be unfairly attacked for actually complying with the law.”

Florida

Florida has not suffered the same level of high-profile scandal that South Carolina has, but the reform movement there has been growing over the past few years. Tea Party activists supported Gov. Rick Scott’s run for office in 2010 in part because of what they thought was his commitment to ethics and transparency. Scott issued an executive order after his election that established a new code of ethics, but he has not pushed for major legislative reforms. His commitment to the issue could finally be tested, though, because the new leaders of the House and Senate have begun their tenures by highlighting ethics.

Both the incoming Senate President Don Gaetz and newly appointed Speaker Will Weatherford, both Republicans, have said repeatedly over the past few months that they will push ethics reforms this session, which begins March 5. Weatherford re-created the House Ethics and Elections Committee for the first time in six years and has said he wants to rein in independent campaign groups.

Gaetz took the first steps toward reform by pushing through new conflict-of-interest rules in the Senate, which members approved in an organizational meeting in November. The rules prevent senators from voting on matters if they could have a “special private gain” from the vote. The idea is to prevent senators from voting on bills that affect specific companies in which they have a financial interest without preventing them from voting on a measure affecting an entire industry they have some connection with. Senators must also take “every reasonable effort” to disclose their conflicts before a vote. Previously, they were allowed to vote on matters whether or not they had a conflict of interest and were required to disclose the conflict only after the fact.

Because the reforms were passed as Senate rules, and not law, it will be up to legislators themselves to resolve any disputes over the disclosures. Dan Krassner, executive director of Integrity Florida, an independent watchdog group, said his organization will push for the Legislature to write the new rules into law, which would allow citizens to register complaints with an outside body.

“An independent ethics enforcement agency or the Florida Commission on Ethics would be a stronger enforcement policy than lawmakers’ own colleagues,” he said.

Lawmakers have also expressed support for a couple of changes that the Ethics Commission, which enforces the state’s ethics laws, has been requesting for years. One would strengthen the commission’s ability to collect unpaid fines for late financial disclosure forms. The other would allow it to take referrals of ethics complaints from other state agencies. Currently, the commission can initiate an investigation only if it receives a sworn complaint, a fact that contributed to the state’s F grade for its ethics enforcement agencies from the State Integrity Investigation. Under the present system, a complainant cannot remain anonymous and can be held liable for legal fees if the complaint contains false allegations. Referrals would allow officials, such as state attorneys, to accept anonymous complaints and conduct initial investigations before sending them to the Ethics Commission. Because no one has introduced specific plans, however, no one knows how much such a change would cost.

Many of the steps may appear incremental, Krassner said, but they represent a notable change nonetheless. “It’s been 36 years,” he said, “since Florida has had its legislative leaders talking about ethics reforms.”

On Jan. 15, the Senate Ethics Committee began drafting a sweeping bill that could include several of these proposals. The committee will vote on the measure soon to send a version to the full chamber in March.

Some advocates of stronger reforms remain skeptical, however. Beth Rosenson, an associate professor of political science at the University of Florida, said the most important reform would be to give the Ethics Commission the power to initiate investigations on its own, a move the Legislature has never supported. The compromise of accepting referrals, she said, is “not quite good enough.”

And Henry Kelley, a local Tea Party activist, said he doesn’t think the new Senate rules will produce much change. Legislators are required to disclose their sources of income, but no one audits the disclosures. “If somebody doesn’t want to play by the rules,” he said, “it’s rather easy to do that.”

Legislators are required to report only a snapshot of their finances, which means that a senator could sell company shares worth millions of dollars the day before filing and the transaction wouldn’t appear in the disclosure report. A legislator could also vote on a bill one day and then enter into a financial relationship with an affected company the next, and no one would know. Krassner said he’ll urge legislators to change this loophole.

Kelley is not optimistic about what he sees as the most important problem: eliminating so-called committees of continuous existence, opaque campaign funds that legislators can use to raise and spend unlimited amounts of money. “I can’t buy a guy dinner, but I can hand him an envelope with $10,000 in it,” he said, citing the state’s ban on gifts from lobbyists. “It gives the impression of ethics laws, without the teeth.”

Weatherford and Gaetz have said they support banning the committees, perhaps in coordination with raising the current $500 cap on individual donations to candidates. But Kelley doubts the measure will pass this session, and no one is discussing tightening rules on lobbyist disclosure, which the State Integrity Investigation identified as a weak spot. “That’s another area where Florida has room for improvement,” Krassner said.

The prevailing view from reform advocates is that all of the talk coming out of election season will face a major test once the session begins. “As realists, we doubt that Florida’s Legislature is about to enter the Promised Land of campaign finance reform,” The Palm Beach Post wrote in a recent editorial. “But if Rep. Weatherford and Sen. Gaetz want to lead Tallahassee in that direction, let’s go along for the ride.”

Georgia

According to the State Integrity Investigation, no state has more room for improvement than Georgia, which ranked dead last on corruption risk. Legislators are not required to disclose gifts they receive from lobbyists (though lobbyists are supposed to report them). Open records laws don’t cover the legislative or the judicial branch.

The State Integrity Investigation overview page paints a troubling picture of the relationship between government and industry in the Peach State. “Executives of insurance companies, public utilities and other regulated entities have become the largest single source of campaign money for regulators running for re-election,” it says. “Utility officials raise money and work to help re-elect incumbents; a lobbyist for the cable TV industry managed one incumbent’s campaign in 2008.”

For several years, the Georgia Alliance for Ethics Reform, a coalition of liberal and conservative activists, has been pushing for ethics reform with little success. Alliance members came up with a 26-point plan that they proposed in 2011, said William Perry, executive director of Common Cause Georgia, but no legislators adopted the cause.

Last session, however, the movement started gaining traction. Sen. McKoon began pushing for several measures in his first term, albeit with little success. Local news outlets covered the issue and eventually published several columns and editorials. Then, McKoon and Perry said, the state’s ranking in the State Integrity Investigation helped transform ethics into a campaign issue last year. “People said, ‘We hear Georgia was worst in the nation in ethics, what do you intend to do about that?’ ” Perry said.

The central issue now is a possible cap on gifts from lobbyists, which currently have no limits. In 2010, for example, lobbyists funded a $17,000 trip to Europe for GOP House Speaker David Ralston and his family to learn about high-speed rail projects. “We’ve seen an explosion in the amount of money that’s being spent on the General Assembly,” McKoon said. Georgia lobbyists spent $1.4 million last year. “That’s distressing.”

McKoon and the activists were able to get nonbinding resolutions calling for a cap on gifts on the July primary ballots last year, and an overwhelming number of voters supported the measures. An editorial in the Columbus, Ga., Ledger-Enquirer said it sent an “unmistakable” message to lawmakers. “Georgians want their political leaders to be accountable to the citizens who elect them, not to the moneyed interests that fund their campaigns and coddle them once they're in office.”

Now Common Cause and other groups are pushing for a $100 limit on each gift. On Jan. 14, the first day of the session, the Senate passed a rule implementing a $100 cap on gifts from lobbyists. The rule contains several loopholes, however, including an exception for travel and lodging for events as long as they are "related to the Senator's official duties." McKoon said that legislators are likely to introduce several bills in the coming months to write a $100 cap into law.

Perry said that after a gift cap, his second priority is to restore the Government Transparency and Campaign Finance Commission’s rule-making authority and to push to provide more money to the body. In 2009, the legislature stripped the commission of its ability to write new rules. One result is that the commission has been unable to collect all of the late filing fees that legislators owe. If a lawmaker fails to submit a disclosure report, for example, the late fee increases as time goes on. State law says the commission must inform the lawmaker by certified mail before increasing the fine. However, the legislature has not given the commission the money for postage, and therefore many fines are simply not collected, Perry explained.

Lawmakers have cut the commission’s budget by more than 40 percent since 2008, more than it has for any other agency, Perry said. It’s become clear, he said, that the commission needs money for things such as office supplies and new computers, but many lawmakers remain reluctant to increase funding. “The whole thing boils down to the fact that they don’t want to open up the can of worms, because everything else can come with it.” The cuts have effectively reduced oversight by preventing the commission from fulfilling its duties, and that suits some lawmakers just fine, Perry said. “We have those great laws, but our commission has no ability to carry them out.”

For this session, McKoon has pre-filed bills to amend the state constitution to ensure permanent funding for the Government Transparency and Campaign Finance Commission and to allow the attorney general to call for grand juries to investigate corruption cases. McKoon’s funding amendment would provide 0.00025 percent of the annual budget to the commission, which for 2013 would work out to roughly $4.5 million, four times what the body currently receives. Other possible bills would call for more-stringent revolving-door rules for outgoing public officials and expand open records laws.

The new senate president pro tempore, David Shafer, has said he’ll support the gift restriction, but he recently gave a less full-throated endorsement of broader reform to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “It is important that we have strong ethics laws, but in the end, ethical behavior comes from within the individual,” he told the newspaper. “There is only so much that laws and rules can do.”

While many of these measures may not pass, advocates for reform say there’s a marked shift. “We’re literally going zero to 60 in two legislative sessions,” Perry said. When the coalition began its effort the session before last, they weren’t able to get a single bill introduced. “Now ethics is poised to probably be the No. 1 issue in the session.”

Revolving door swings freely in America's statehouses

2013-03-18T14:02:38-04:00

On October 26, 2011, the Illinois legislature passed a bill that authorized construction of a multi-billion-dollar smart grid and reshaped how utility companies seek approval for raising electricity rates. Consumer groups opposed the measure, saying it was a handout to utilities.

But the final blow for opponents came three months later when former state Rep. Kevin McCarthy, who had pushed the bill through the legislature only to resign after winning its passage, registered his own lobbying firm and signed his first clients. Prominent among them: Commonwealth Edison, one of the state’s largest utilities.

“It’s hard to believe that there wasn’t a quid pro quo for this,” said Scott Musser, an Illinois lobbyist for AARP, which opposed the bill.

McCarthy declined to comment. And despite the potential conflict of interest, his move seems to have been in full compliance with state ethics laws. In Illinois and 14 other states, there aren’t any laws preventing legislators from resigning one day and registering as lobbyists the next, according to data compiled by the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Most other states impose “cooling off” periods of one or two years during which legislators or government officials are restricted from lobbying or taking certain private-sector jobs. But a review by the State Integrity Investigation found that in several of those states, including Florida, Indiana and Utah, to name a few, the rules are riddled with loopholes, narrowly written or loosely enforced.

And so in many states, it is simply common practice for lawmakers and other officials to cash in on their expertise and connections by lobbying or consulting for the private sector immediately after leaving office. Ethics experts say this “revolving door” erodes public trust in government and corrupts policy-making.

In the most egregious cases, legislators or regulators have written laws or set policy that helps a business or industry with whom they have been negotiating for a job once they leave office. Some states do not ban this practice.

“It smells bad, I guess is about the nicest way I can say it,” said Peggy Kerns, director of the Center for Ethics in Government at the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Need for balance

Even advocates of stricter revolving-door laws caution that a balance must be struck. A complete ban on post-employment lobbying or overly restrictive laws preventing other private-sector work could discourage qualified people from serving in public office and unfairly penalize them for their work. The issue can be particularly complicated at the state level, where many legislatures meet for just a few months a year and pay lawmakers modest salaries. Those calling for stronger laws generally support one- or two-year cooling off periods.

But in the absence of such temporary bans, ethics experts say the revolving door between government and the private sector helps elevate the interests of wealthy private clients above those of the public.

“Legislators build up relationships with one another,” said Jason Kander, Missouri’s new secretary of state, who pushed unsuccessfully for ethics reforms as a state legislator. “It’s one thing when that working relationship is beneficial to your constituents — that’s how the process is supposed to work. But when that relationship becomes beneficial to paid interests, that’s when you cross the ethical line.”

From legislator to lobbyist

In 2003, Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich signed an ethics reform bill that placed limits on post-government employment for certain public officials. The law prevents officials from taking a job if they oversaw a contract with their potential employer while in government. The reform came after the administrator of the Illinois Gaming Board started working for Harrah’s casino immediately after resigning from office in 2003. But the law does not prevent a legislator from sponsoring a bill that benefits a company and then resigning in order to work for the firm.

McCarthy’s case was perhaps the most dramatic example of this, but he is not alone. Over the past year, several other lawmakers have stepped down to begin lobbying careers. In a March editorial, the Chicago Tribune wrote that legislators should “be embarrassed” by the common practice.

The Senate sponsor of the electrical utility bill, Mike Jacobs, is the son of a former legislator who now lobbies for ComEd, the utility, among other clients. ComEd also hired Rep. Marlow Colvin, who had actually proposed another piece of legislation that the utility opposed, after he resigned in March. Colvin told an Illinois newspaper he had been talking with ComEd about the position for months before his retirement. Another representative stepped down in November and will head the Illinois Petroleum Council, an industry lobbying group.

“It’s akin to insider trading,” said David Morrison, deputy director of the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform, a good-government group. Morrison said companies that can afford to hire former legislators as lobbyists gain an advantage when promoting their interests in the capital.

The other states without laws restricting legislators’ post-government employment are Arkansas, Delaware, Idaho, Maine, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio, Texas, Vermont and Wyoming. Some states have different rules for members of the legislative and executive branches. Missouri, for example, does impose restrictions on executive officials. Lawmakers in Michigan are prohibited from lobbying immediately if they resign before the end of a session, but are free to lobby once a new session begins.

Resigning early

As Illinois shows, some outgoing legislators resign early rather than serve their full terms. The move usually has little effect on governance as long as the session has ended (most legislatures meet for only part of the year). But in North Carolina, the timing can help circumnavigate the state’s six-month cooling off period.

Harold Brubaker, a Republican who had been speaker of the House when the party controlled the legislature in the 1990s, ended his long legislative career by resigning last July after the session ended. “You know when it’s time to go,” he said in a statement at the time. But the statement also mentioned that he planned to begin lobbying. By stepping down in July, Brubaker will be eligible to lobby his former colleagues as soon as the next legislative session begins, later this month.

Brubaker did not respond to requests for comment.

In September, a local Republican group held an event to honor Brubaker and several legislators attended, including Speaker Thom Tillis, who presented him with an award. A local paper reported that Brubaker’s acceptance speech included one request for his former colleagues. “Just remember one thing,” Brubaker said, “When I come visit you in the future, just say ‘Yes.’”

The move shows that North Carolina’s six-month cooling off period, which advocates won only after a hard battle in 2005, is “badly in need of change,” said Jane Pinsky, who heads the North Carolina Coalition for Lobbying and Government Reform. State Sen. Richard Stevens stepped down in September and announced he would join a Raleigh law firm, though he said he wasn’t sure whether he would lobby the legislature. Such moves “undermine confidence in state government,” Pinsky said.

As for Brubaker, by resigning early he was also able to straddle the line with his campaign funds. Lobbyists are barred from making campaign contributions in North Carolina, but there’s nothing saying a future lobbyist can’t. Brubaker still had about $37,000 left in his campaign account when he announced his intentions, according to campaign finance records, and about six weeks later he sent $6,800 to three former colleagues.

Narrow rules

Most states do have laws limiting what type of private work public officials can immediately turn to after leaving office, even beyond restrictions on lobbying. But in some states the laws are so narrow or are interpreted so loosely that good-government groups say they fail to prevent many conflicts of interest.

In Indiana, for example, a post-employment rule prohibits officials in the executive branch from taking certain jobs within a year of leaving office and bans for life work on matters they “substantially participated” in while in office. In a 2010 report, The Indianapolis Business Journal examined 27 cases since 2006 and found that the state Ethics Commission enforced the one-year cooling off period in only three of those cases. The commission allowed all the rest to begin their next job immediately, though it did limit the officials from working on certain contracts in 12 cases. Two budget directors, for example, were allowed to work for companies even though they voted on the issuance of bonds involving those companies while in office.

The Journal report was spurred by a revolving-door scandal that led to fines, resignations and even an indictment that is still not settled. In September 2010, Scott Storms left his job as a lawyer and administrative law judge for the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission to work for Duke Energy, which had been negotiating with the commission over the construction of a cutting-edge coal-powered plant and the deployment of a smart-grid system.

A consumer group raised alarm over the move, and it soon emerged that Storms had conducted hearings involving Duke in the days after the company had offered him a job, in July of 2010. Duke put Storms on leave and Gov. Mitch Daniels fired David Lott Hardy, Storms’s boss at the utility commission, after it became clear that Hardy had known of the Duke dealings. After a complaint was brought, the same Ethics Commission that had allowed Storms to go to Duke ended up fining him $12,000 and barring him from future state employment, ruling that Storms had violated conflict of interest rules by working on matters involving Duke while negotiating with the company for a job. Storms denied wrongdoing. Hardy is now awaiting trial on charges of misconduct over the case.

However, the Ethics Commission did not find Storms to have violated the post-employment rule. While he did oversee issues involving Duke, Storms did not directly regulate the company or issue contracts.

“I’m not going to say the words ‘there’s nothing wrong with it,’” said David Thomas, the state’s inspector general, who investigates ethics issues in the executive branch. But, he added, “The post-employment rule wasn’t violated.”

The Indianapolis Star said in an August 2011 editorial that the scandal revealed a “pervasive pattern of intimacy between regulatory officers” and Duke, adding that the arrangements were, “unjustifiable by any measure of common sense.”

IG Thomas says his office has effectively enforced the law, pointing to 47 cases in which his office, which staffs the Ethics Commission, has issued 117 restrictions since the revolving-door law was enacted in 2005. He said that accusations that his office is too lenient indicate a misunderstanding of the law, which he says imposes a one-year waiting period only if an employee was directly regulating a company or involved in issuing contracts. In a report to the state legislature last year, Thomas recommended against making the revolving-door law more restrictive, pointing to a 2010 federal court ruling that struck down Ohio’s cooling off period as too broad.

Julia Vaughn, policy director for Common Cause Indiana, disagrees. She said the attitude that led to the Storms scandal has continued throughout the Daniels administration. “This does go all the way to the top,” she said. “It reveals a conspiracy to just get around these laws, that they were considered an inconvenience and that they stood in the way of people who wanted to use their public influence for private gain.”

Last summer, Purdue University’s board of trustees, most of whom Daniels had appointed, named him the next university president. The inspector general’s office said the move would not violate ethics laws. But Vaughn and others have said the case presents clear conflicts of interest and shows the weakness of the state’s laws and the Ethics Commission.

“It’s been a rubber stamp agency for a long time,” Vaughn said. “The law’s only as good as the enforcement of it.”

The Daniels administration declined to comment for this story, referring questions to the inspector general. But after a Democratic lawmaker filed an ethics complaint in response to Daniels’ appointment as Purdue president, a spokeswoman for the governor called it “partisan nonsense.”

Loopholes abound

Even where laws on post-government lobbying exist and are enforced, outgoing public officials have found ways to comply while violating the spirit, government watchdog groups argue. In many cases, lawmakers are prevented from registering as lobbyists for a certain time frame but not from working in an office full of lobbyists and advising them.

“I think that’s a slippery area that needs to be closed,” said Kerns, of the Center for Ethics in Government. “I don’t think any public official should have any kind of a job from a lobbying firm.”

Florida has a two-year cooling off period during which ex-legislators cannot lobby their former colleagues. But this hasn’t stopped them from working for lobbying firms or from lobbying the executive branch. According to the Orlando Sentinel, at least eight former speakers of the Florida House went on to lobby after leaving the legislature. One of them, John Thrasher, pulled in $1.6 million as a lobbyist in 2008, according to the Sentinel, compared to a state lawmaker’s salary of just under $30,000 a year (Thrasher subsequently returned to government as a state senator).

The most recent example is Dean Cannon, who formed his own firm even before leaving office in November, though the firm is not yet registered to lobby. In order to comply with state law, Cannon has said he will focus on lobbying the executive branch and working as a consultant to local governments on political and legislative strategies. His colleague and predecessor as speaker, Larry Cretul, will handle the firm’s legislative lobbying.

The arrangement has led some to question the law’s effectiveness. Cannon was a strong ally of the Orlando-Orange County Expressway Authority, for example, as it fought last session against a proposal that would have consolidated the agency with several others. Before he left office, the authority invited Cannon to a November meeting to help the agency prepare for the next legislative session. A spokeswoman for the agency told the Sentinel that her company invited Cannon as the outgoing speaker, but by the time the meeting occurred he had already announced he would soon be lobbying. He has also acknowledged he is seeking a lobbying contract with the authority.

The episode prompted the Sentinel to question Florida’s revolving-door law, and its enforcement, in a November editorial. “Floridians can’t be blamed,” the paper wrote, “for wondering if senators and representatives are making decisions to serve the public interest or to please potential employers.”

On Tuesday, the Senate Ethics Committee began work on a sweeping ethics reform bill that could prevent similar moves in the future, either by expanding the cooling off period to include executive branch lobbying or by preventing lawmakers from accepting any work for a firm that lobbies the legislature.

The loophole that allows legislators to work for lobbying firms even applies while they are still in office. One of the side effects of having a part-time legislature, as Florida and nearly all states do, is that many lawmakers often have more lucrative work on the side. According to a report published in July by Integrity Florida, a nonprofit that pushes for ethics reform, 11 lawmakers in the state reported earning money from firms engaged in lobbying in the 2012 session.

Utah’s law, passed in 2009, contains perhaps the biggest loophole. While it bans lawmakers from lobbying for one year after leaving office, it exempts anyone lobbying for themselves or for a business they are associated with, as long as lobbying is not the business’ primary activity. In 2009, a governor’s commission recommended closing the loophole, but a 2010 effort to do just that failed to pass the state House.

Term limits

Some academics and watchdog groups argue that term limits, which several states have enacted over the past two decades, effectively force more legislators into lobbying jobs. Voters in Michigan approved term limits in 1992, restricting members of the state House to three two-year terms and senators and statewide officials to two four-year terms.

In October, the Detroit Free Press tracked the careers of 291 officials elected from 1992-2004 and found that 71 of them, or nearly one-quarter, ended up either registering as lobbyists or working as consultants or paid advocates. Two former chairs of a House energy committee went to work for utility companies. In the 2009-2010 session, Rep. Kathy Angerer sponsored a bill that would have imposed a two-year cooling off period. The bill failed, however, and Angerer joined AT&T as a lobbyist after the session ended.

Florida’s Dean Cannon was limited by term limits, and some proponents of stronger revolving-door laws blame term limits for worsening the revolving door in Missouri and Nebraska as well.

Reforms

Legislators are often reluctant to limit their own options for earning a living. Rep. Jennifer Weiss, a North Carolina Democrat who did not run for re-election in 2012, learned this firsthand when she was part of a group that helped pass the state’s revolving-door law.

“I had wanted a year all along,” Weiss said, but the group met with too much resistance from legislators on both sides of the aisle, she added, and had to settle for a six-month cooling off period. “People wanted to be able to leave the legislature and lobby, to be blunt.”

Similar efforts have failed over the past few years in Idaho, Michigan, Missouri and Illinois, to name a few. Morrison of the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform said his group compromised by pushing for a six-month cooling off period rather than a year, but the initiative has made no progress.

Morrison said Illinois’ laws are effective at slowing the revolving door for executive branch officials. And Weiss stressed that a six-month period is better than nothing. While most states do impose some limits, ethics experts say that laws should not completely restrict lawmakers or other officials from moving to the private sector.

“They need something else to do,” said George Connor, a professor of political science at Missouri State University.

Still, Connor said, loose laws in Missouri allow a pervasive revolving-door culture. The state’s outgoing speaker of the House, Steven Tilley, resigned last summer and immediately began a new career in political consulting and lobbying, a step that Connor said has a corrosive effect on governance. “These kinds of relationships cause people to lose sight of the public interest,” he said.

One of Tilley’s last moves as speaker was to appoint a “blue-ribbon” committee tasked with generating ideas for updating the state’s highway system. Tilley, who did not respond to requests for comment, appointed Rod Jetton, a former speaker and now marketing director of a Missouri engineering firm, as co-chair. Also named to the committee was Thomas Dunne, the outgoing chairman and CEO of Fred Weber, Inc., a highway construction company and also one of the first clients that Tilley signed after leaving office.

“It’s the smell test,” Connor said. “That smells bad.”

IMPACT: Rhode Island to publish more state records online

2013-01-11T06:00:01-05:00

The state of Rhode Island will broaden access to government information through a new online portal under an initiative announced Thursday by Gov. Lincoln Chafee. Chafee said many documents will be available immediately and that the state will continue to add audits, contracts and other financial documents to the website over the next 18 months.

“The people of Rhode Island deserve more and better information about the operation and management of their government,” said Chafee in a statement. “I believe that greater openness and transparency will ultimately strengthen our citizens’ faith in their government, bolster our national reputation, and increase our economic competitiveness.”

The new “Transparency Portal” provides easy access to government financial data and documents. Users can search for contracts by bid number or vendor, sort through government expenditures or file a public records request, all on one site.

Chafee, an Independent, has promised in the past to improve transparency. In June, he signed a bill that broadened the state’s public records laws.

Some documents published on the new site had been accessible elsewhere, while others, such as contracts, had to be requested through open records laws.

“It seems to be as much about accessibility as it is about transparency,” said John Marion, executive director of Common Cause Rhode Island.

Christine Hunsinger, a spokeswoman for the governor, said his administration would like journalists and the public to try out the site and report back on what type of additional information they’d like to see included. “It’s an ongoing, iterative process,” she said.

Rhode Island earned a B- for its access to public information from the State Integrity Investigation, a 50-state ranking of transparency and corruption risk released in March. The project is a collaboration between Global Integrity, Public Radio International and the Center for Public Integrity. Global Integrity has been working with Chafee’s office to help bolster the state’s open government practices. Rhode Island received an overall grade of C from the State Integrity Investigation, which ranked it ninth among the states.

IMPACT: Florida Senate votes for stronger ethics rules

2013-04-29T14:42:20-04:00

Florida’s Senate approved a new set of ethics rules today that will strengthen the body’s conflict of interest guidelines. The vote marked the first action to emerge from a vocal push for ethics reform by the state’s incoming legislative leaders.

Senate President Don Gaetz, who took control during today’s organizational meeting, proposed the rules Monday after committing to reforms during the election season.

"I hope that's the first step in many steps we are able to take in the Senate and House when it comes to ethics," Gaetz told the Miami Herald, adding that he’d also like to strengthen the enforcement powers of the Florida Commission on Ethics, which oversees ethics rules. Gaetz joined the Senate in 2006 after a long career as a health care executive.

The rules require senators to take an ethics course every other year and bars them from voting on issues in which they have a conflict of interest — though it will be up to them to decide. Previously, senators were allowed to vote whether or not they judged themselves to have a conflict, and were not required to disclose the conflict until after voting. The new rules also specify that the measure extends to potential financial gain by family members and business associates.

“These reforms put more emphasis on public service rather than past rules that allowed private gain to go unchecked,” said Dan Krassner, executive director of the open-government group Integrity Florida, in a statement released Monday. In July, the group issued a report calling for stricter financial disclosure rules, citing previous reports from the Center for Public Integrity. The state received an overall grade of C- from the Center's State Integrity Investigation for corruption risk.

Rep. Will Weatherford, Florida’s new House Speaker, has also called for reforms. Earlier this month he revived a House subcommittee devoted to ethics and elections that had not met for six years.

If you want to compare the new with the old, the Tallahassee Democrat posted the relevant section of the rules.

Baby steps toward ethics reform in South Carolina

2012-11-20T17:02:00-05:00

Legislators in South Carolina have taken initial steps toward what could be the first major overhaul of the state’s ethics rules in twenty years. As the Free Times reported this morning, government watchdog groups rattled off their wish lists at a hearing held last week by a panel of state House Democrats. South Carolina earned an overall grade of F for corruption risk from the State Integrity Investigation earlier this year, and fallout from that report — along with a series of recent ethics scandals — appears to have built political consensus on the need for reforms, said John Crangle of South Carolina Common Cause.

Among the changes called for at the hearing: more robust financial disclosure requirements, new rules on PACs and the creation of a more independent ethics oversight body. State leaders have formed four separate panels to help shape a reform package, one convened by each party in the state House, one by the majority Republicans in the Senate and one at the direction of GOP Gov. Nikki Haley.

The House Republican panel will hold its first hearing Thursday morning. Crangle said it’s too early to say whether the legislature will take recommendations from the panels and adopt substantive changes in the 2013 legislative session.

Redistricting: GOP and Dems alike have cloaked the process in secrecy

2013-03-18T14:02:38-04:00

When state legislators in Wisconsin began work last year on a plan for redistricting, the once-a-decade process when states draw new district maps for Congress and state legislatures, they found themselves presented with non-disclosure agreements requiring them to keep their deliberations confidential.

In Ohio, the Republican National Committee kicked off a training session on redistricting for state leaders by telling them to “keep it secret.”

Democratic leaders in Illinois held dozens of public hearings after promising a more open process. But all of the meetings came before the congressional redistricting maps were released, and the Democratic majority quickly approved their own proposals with little opportunity for the public, or Republicans, to voice concerns.

In the lead up to the most recent round of redistricting, which began last year with the release of data from the 2010 census, politicians, advocates and “good government” groups nationwide pushed to open the process to citizens and allow for broader debate than in the past. The idea was that a transparent process would lead to maps that made more sense geographically and better reflected voters’ interests.

But with few exceptions, the political parties in control of statehouses rammed their own partisan proposals through the legislatures as quickly as possible, leaving little more than nominal opportunities for the public to influence the process. In several states, legislatures outsourced the actual work to lawyers and used claims of attorney-client privilege to further exclude the public.

Earlier this year, the State Integrity Investigation, a data-driven analysis of state government accountability, reviewed each state’s redistricting process for transparency and potential for public input. Just 18 states received A’s; 24 received a D or an F.

Advocates, citizens and political parties have filed 194 lawsuits challenging congressional or state legislative lines in 41 states. Courts drew the final maps in nine states, either because the legislature’s maps were deemed discriminatory or because lawmakers could not agree on a final plan. Lawsuits are still pending in eight states. While the lines in those states are likely set for this election, the lawsuits could force new maps for 2014.

Despite all the litigation, experts say, the end result this time won’t be much different than in the past, when a procedure intended to assure that each American receives equal representation is instead used by Republicans and Democrats alike to game the system to their advantage. Republicans controlled four times as many state legislatures as did Democrats, but after the GOP won huge gains in 2010, there wasn’t much room to increase their advantage. The party’s intent instead, experts say, was to secure the seats they already have. According to an analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice,part of the New York University School of Law, Republicans pushed 11 additional districts to their advantage, meaning 241 seats now lean Republican, one fewer than the party currently holds as the result of a big victory in 2010.

Often, neither party can gain many seats overall through redistricting, so both seek to protect their incumbents, creating safer seats, less competitive elections and, some say, more partisan politicians.

According to an analysis by Fair Vote, a nonprofit that advocates for election reform, the two parties have been so successful that only 74 congressional races, or 17 percent of seats, remain competitive, 15 fewer than in 2010.

To achieve safe seats, politicians sometimes drew splotchy, disjointed districts that carve up neighborhoods, throw together disparate groups whose concerns have little in common and make little sense in terms of representative democracy. Democrats working on Maryland’s 3rd district, a recent Washington Post editorial said, “split, severed or dissected” 42 of its precincts in an effort to cobble together a Democratic-leaning map. Two chunks of the district are not even connected to the rest. Opponents placed a measure on the November ballot that would overturn the state’s new districts.

The system “turns democracy on its head,” said Gerry Hebert, a former Justice Department lawyer who is now executive director of the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan public interest group. He also runs a private practice focusing on redistricting and election law, and is currently arguing challenges to new maps in several states, including Texas. “Instead of voters choosing their representatives, which is how I understand it’s supposed to work, you have representatives choosing their voters.”

The 'Gerry-mander'

The process of drawing district lines for partisan gain is as old as the nation. One early attempt was driven by Elbridge Gerry, who as governor of Massachusetts approved new district lines in 1812 to solidify his party’s reign over the state Senate. A cartoonist chose one particularly awkward looking district, stretched to pick-and-choose sympathetic voters, and drew it as a giant salamander, naming it the “Gerry-mander.”

Redistricting was not carried out consistently, however, leaving districts of vastly different size. By the 1960s, Los Angeles County’s population was 422 times greater than that of California’s least populous district, yet each had only one representative in Congress.

The Supreme Court ruled in 1962 that states must redraw their congressional and state legislative districts every ten years, after release of new census data, to ensure that everyone receives roughly equal representation. But the high court largely allowed the states to decide how they would go about it.

While most states have general guidelines for drawing new districts, including that they must be relatively compact in shape, most allow the legislature to draw lines largely as its members please. The only strict federal law, coming from the Voting Rights Act, is that district maps must adequately represent the state’s minority voters. The idea is to prevent legislators from packing minorities into a small number of districts or spreading groups across too many to dilute their vote. In several states with a history of discrimination, the federal government must approve (“preclear”) new maps.

Some states, including California and Arizona, have placed redistricting in the hands of nonpartisan or bipartisan independent commissions. Some have independent advisory boards. This time around, greater access to computers and open source technology enabled the public to at least try to influence the process like never before. Michael McDonald, an associate professor of government and politics at George Mason University, helped create public competitions in several states where students and others used software to generate their own district maps.

But these efforts largely failed to influence the final plans that states adopted, McDonald said. And in some cases, legislators only increased their efforts to maintain control and avoid public participation.

“You shine that spotlight,” he said, “and the cockroaches just scurry further into the shadows.”

With few exceptions, excluding the public and intentionally drawing districts for partisan gain remains the norm, and remains perfectly legal.

‘Ignore the Public’

Wisconsin Republicans were presented with a rare opportunity in 2011. For the first time in decades, one party controlled both houses of the Legislature and held the governor’s office in a redistricting year, enabling them to run the entire process.

The public was excluded. To help draw the maps, Republican leaders hired a law firm that required all legislators who wanted to discuss the plans to sign a confidentiality agreement. Legislative aides produced talking points instructing legislators to focus on what happened in their closed door sessions before the release. “Public comments on this map may be different than what you hear in this room,” the memo advised. “Ignore the public comments.”

Leaders published their proposals on July 8 and held only one public meeting, five days later. The plans had been ready at least a couple of weeks earlier, but the leaders would not even show them to many legislators. On July 19, the Senate approved the maps on a party line vote. The state’s redistricting process received an F from the State Integrity Investigation.

“The end result was a partisan gerrymander, pure and simple,” said Mike McCabe, director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, a state watchdog group. “It was a highly secretive and highly partisan process.”

Assembly Speaker Jeff Fitzgerald, whose office reportedly produced the talking points, did not return calls and emails to his office and staff requesting comment.

Not until a group of citizens and legislators sued were documents released showing the concerted effort to exclude the public. A recent editorial in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reacted to reports the law firm hadn’t even turned over all the documents that the court requested, calling the Republicans’ politicking “simply outrageous.”

The extreme secrecy was part of an effort to approve new maps before the state’s recall elections, when Republicans ultimately lost control of the Senate. Legislative leaders were so intent on beating the recall that they actually rewrote a state law preventing them from drawing state-wide lines before local governments had drawn their own. The final lines plucked two Democratic-leaning cities from the district of a vulnerable GOP freshman and tacked them onto the left-leaning 3rd district. The result is an island of blue surrounded by Republican districts. The lines are being challenged in state court.

‘Lip service’

While Wisconsin’s process was especially controversial, the state is hardly alone. The State Integrity Investigation conducted dozens of interviews across the country and collected information on how each state handles redistricting. About half of the states provide little or no opportunity for public involvement, resulting in an opaque and often partisan process with little or no transparency. Several states charted a route similar to Wisconsin’s, using claims of attorney-client privilege to try to shield the process from public view.

In the state-by-state report cards, twenty-one received F’s on redistricting: Kentucky, New Hampshire, Wisconsin, North Dakota, Ohio, Alabama, Minnesota, Michigan, Tennessee, North Carolina, Georgia, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Texas, West Virginia, Alaska, New York, Oklahoma, Maine and Utah. Grades of D or D- went to Maryland, Arkansas and Nevada. (Seven states have only one congressional representative. For those, the rankings focused on state legislative redistricting only.)

In Tennessee, legislative leaders promised “the most open, interactive and transparent” redistricting process in the state’s history. But Republican leaders did not release any information on the plans until the end of the process, about a week before they adopted the proposals. The party did not release full, detailed maps of state legislative districts until two weeks after the legislature had approved them.

Hebert said that in most states, calls from legislators for more transparency have led to nothing.

“It’s lip service,” he said. “They couldn’t care less what people say.”

One particularly blatant example occurred in 2003 in Texas, when Republicans, who were redrawing the state’s district lines after the party won a majority in the statehouse, convened in a central office.

“They actually took brown paper and pasted it up on the glass wall of the legislature offices so nobody could look in,” Hebert said.

Choosing Voters

While to some it seems unethical, many states allow legislators to draw maps for political gain and to protect incumbents. The Supreme Court has allowed plaintiffs to challenge maps based on partisan gerrymandering, but it’s never ruled in favor of such a claim. In effect, said Justin Levitt, a redistricting expert at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, the court has said that too much partisan redistricting may be illegal, but it hasn’t said what would qualify as too much.

Two of the most dramatic examples of partisanship this last cycle were Illinois and North Carolina. Illinois presented Democrats with one of their only shots at reversing GOP gains from 2010, when the party won 11 of the state’s 19 House seats. Democrats control the Legislature and hold the governorship, the first time that’s happened in the state since 1970. After promising an open process, the legislature held 31 public hearings across the state on plans for the state Legislature. But only three of those occurred after legislative maps were released. Democrats held no meetings after publishing the congressional map, which came just four days before the final vote approving the plans.

Democrats were able to give themselves 11 safe seats, three more than they had before, even as the state lost a seat due to population shifts. They left Republicans with just two safe seats, with an additional five considered balanced, according to an analysis by Fair Vote. Courts rejected several challenges to the maps.

In North Carolina, however, Republicans made up for these losses. As detailed in the October issue of The Atlantic, state leaders hired Tom Hofeller, a seasoned GOP mapmaker, to help gain control of the state’s congressional delegation without running afoul of the Voting Rights Act; the state is among those that must submit maps for federal approval. Hofeller concentrated the state’s Democrats into a handful of districts, removing left-leaning enclaves from seats where Republicans might otherwise face tough challenges. The result is a map that favors Republicans 10-3 by snatching away a Democratic-leaning seat and eliminating the two toss-ups. The Department of Justice approved the maps, but a separate lawsuit claiming racial gerrymandering is still pending and could force new maps for 2014.

Even though state legislatures generally have the authority to draw new maps, it is an open secret that members of Congress often pick and choose where their district lines will lie. In Ohio, emails released in a lawsuit show that members of House Speaker John Boehner’s political team were in close contact with state leaders. In one note, state Senate President Thomas Niehaus told Tom Whatman, a member of Boehner’s team, that he would not approve a map without Boehner’s support. In another email, Whatman requested that state leaders extend one district line to include the headquarters of a top campaign donor to that district’s representative, Jim Renacci. The map also split the city of Toledo into three districts, a move that the deputy mayor said rendered the town “politically irrelevant.”

In testimony before the Ohio Senate Government Oversight and Reform Committee last year, Richard Gunther, a professor of political science at Ohio State, called the effort “the most grotesque partisan gerrymander,” he had ever seen. In an email message, Gunther added that Republicans are likely to hold 12 of the state’s 16 congressional seats even though the party rarely garners much more than half of the statewide vote.

Boehner’s political office did not return a request for comment for this story. Neither did the National Republican Congressional Committee, the Republican National Committee or the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

A Mess in the Lone Star State

While most state legislatures operate for political gain, few can top the baldly partisan warfare in Texas. It was there, in 2003, that Democratic legislators fled the state in a failed attempt to prevent a vote on new district maps. The new lines helped flip the state’s congressional delegation in the 2004 election to majority Republican.

This year Republicans sought to hold those gains. But the party faced a problem it had experienced in the previous round as well: a growing Latino population that tends to favor Democrats. GOP leaders thought they’d found a way to keep their hold on power, but their tactics kicked off a complex web of lawsuits that eventually forced the state to delay its primaries from March to May.

The lawsuits uncovered documents showing exactly how Republicans tried to defy the demographic trend. In one email, a lawyer hired by the state’s GOP congressional delegation described how state legislators could remove Latinos who are more likely to vote from the district of a vulnerable Republican and switch them with Latinos who tend not to vote, taken from a Democratic-leaning district. The result would be a “nudge factor” that would keep Latino populations the same, thereby avoiding Voting Rights Act violations, while essentially weakening the power of the Latino vote.

Meanwhile, Republican leaders were granting requests from congressmen in Washington, D.C., to tweak their districts to include a country club or the school that one congressman’s “grand babies” attended.

State House Speaker Joe Straus declined to answer specific questions about redistricting but said in a statement that the maps reflect population changes. Opponents have charged that the GOP plan failed to add majority Latino districts even though Latinos account for 65 percent of the state’s population gain since 2000.

Texas Democrats also tried to shunt Latino voters out of districts where they thought they might pose a threat in primary elections, said Nina Perales, vice president of litigation at MALDEF, a Latino civil rights group that filed lawsuits in Texas and other states.

“Being a voting rights lawyer in Texas redistricting is like driving a very small car down the highway between two semis,” she said, “and those semis are the Democratic Party and the Republican Party.”

Ultimately, federal courts rejected some of the new districts, saying they did not adequately represent Latinos. The 2012 election will use lines that were drawn as a compromise at the direction of a federal court, but the state will have to draw new lines for 2014.

Taxpayers Foot the Bill

Litigation has become a necessary part of the redistricting process, but it’s one that is costing taxpayers millions of dollars each cycle. Gerry Hebert remembers seeing Tom Hofeller, the GOP redistricting expert, give a presentation on preparing for redistricting several years ago that illustrates the point. “He has a slide that says,‘never travel without counsel.’ I think that’s great advice, being a lawyer myself, but the meter’s running.”

While no one has estimated the total cost of all this litigation — with 194 suits filed in this cycle and 65 still active — the tab can run into the millions for each state. According to The Texas Tribune, legal fees had already cost taxpayers in that state close to $1.5 million as of April, and litigation is ongoing. In New Mexico, where a court drew the final lines, lawsuits cost the state $5.7 million. In Wisconsin, where litigation is not yet resolved, fees have topped $1 million.

Perales of MALDEF said the case of Texas shows how wasteful the system can be. Even though her organization and others work with legislators as they are drawing the maps to try to avoid litigation, political leaders continue to push plans that exclude minorities and the opposing party. “When the legislators hear our sound legal advice and they flaunt the rules, nobody can be surprised when we bring successful litigation,” she said. When challengers do win, states generally must pay the plaintiffs’ legal fees, too. “It’s very irresponsible for a state like Texas to adopt a plan that’s discriminatory.”

Hebert said majority parties often waste taxpayer money by forcing cases to trial rather than settling them. But with the system as it is, with little guidance from the Supreme Court on how far a political party can go to protect its incumbents, he stressed that litigation continues to be an important last resort. “Sometimes the courts are the only place you can have a fair shake,” he said.

Efforts at reform

A few states have attempted to address the partisan excesses by removing redistricting from the control of the legislature. In 2008, California voters passed a referendum creating an independent citizen commission to handle redistricting.

In previous cycles, the two major parties had struck an informal deal protecting incumbents on each side. This time, a group of eight citizen-commissioners held dozens of public meetings to help shape their proposals.

Advocates for redistricting reform have praised California, but it’s unclear how much the new system really changed the results. Democrats will likely maintain their dominance of the state’s congressional delegation, but most experts agree the new districts have put more heat on incumbents in a state where they have won 253 out of 255 races in the past five elections. In a well-publicized case, the new map has pitted two sitting Democratic congressmen against each other (voters also passed a law the puts the two most popular candidates from the primaries on the final ballot, regardless of party affiliation).

It’s also proven impossible to remove politics completely. A probe by the investigative news outlet ProPublica found that Democrats manipulated the system by having fake citizens groups represent the party’s interests at public meetings. Loyola’s Justin Levitt said it’s unlikely the Democrats’ tactics fooled the commissioners. He acknowledges the new system is still open to political influence, but he said it’s far better than the alternative and that it helped make more competitive races this year.

In Arizona too, politics intruded on what is supposed to be an independent commission. In 2000, voters there created a bipartisan commission consisting of two representatives of each party and an independent chair. Last year, as the commission was drawing new lines, Republican Gov. Jan Brewer sought to impeach both Democrats and the independent chair, Colleen Mathis, claiming they were favoring Democrats and operating in secret. The state senate did vote to remove Mathis in November, but a state court stepped in later that month and overturned the decision, returning Mathis to the position. The commission did approve final maps in January, though several lawsuits challenging the maps and the process remain unsettled.

“You’re never going to completely wash politics out of the process,” said McDonald, of George Mason University.

While the legislature in Florida maintains control of redistricting, voters passed a constitutional amendment in 2010 prohibiting lawmakers from implementing district lines that benefit a particular party or incumbent. The law opened the way for court challenges based on partisan gerrymandering, and opponents have done just that, with a trial scheduled to begin in February. The Brennan Center’s analysis found that Democrats gained two seats in the state even though Republicans controlled the process.

Advocates for reform stress that their best opportunity may be in the next year or two, when memories of the partisan squabbles are fresh and, importantly, when the next redistricting is years away. That means that state legislators who support reform may no longer be in office next time. If reforms lead to more competitive races, at least it will be someone else running in those races.

A coalition of advocacy groups in Ohio has placed an initiative on the November ballot that would create a system similar to California’s. Opponents have said the proposal would waste millions of taxpayer dollars.

Levitt of Loyola Law School and others say there’s no single system that works for every state, but the key is to ensure that lawmakers don’t have free rein to draw their own lines. As long as legislators can work the system in their favor and help keep their own jobs, they will.

“It’s not necessarily evil,” he said. “It’s natural.”