By Carter Bundy
A few weeks ago I wrote about limiting gifts to legislators but also giving them a decent salary for the massive job they do. This week, I’m going to take on lobbyist regulations and sunshine laws.
Coming clean: lobbyist disclosure
Let’s tackle the simplest reforms first: There’s no question that we need more transparency so that legislators, voters and other lobbyists can all know who is doing what for whom. The Governor’s Task Force on Ethics Reform had three great suggestions:
First, with computers being nearly ubiquitous in
A second proposal is far lower-tech: lobbyist badges. There are so many well-connected friends of legislators lobbying at the Roundhouse that it’s hard to tell what’s a friendly chat and what’s business. I lobby for AFSCME, and make no secret of it. Other lobbyists shouldn’t have anything to hide, either.
Finally, the members of the ethics task force got it right when they said that the amount spent on lobbying by each organization should be reported. Not individual salaries, just the total spent by each employer. The public ought to know who is paying how much to influence the public’s elected officials, regardless of the cause.
Cooling off Tauzin
Another ethics task force recommendation is a “cooling off” period of one year during which recently retired legislators could not immediately be paid to lobby. That rule currently applies to all state government officials and employees except legislators.
What’s wrong with a legislator taking his or her hard-earned skills and knowledge and putting them to use soon after retirement? The Medicare Part D legislation offers the clearest example of how easily government can be corrupted without that rule.
During the debate over prescription drug coverage, there were incredibly anti-market, anti-senior, anti-taxpayer proposals: First, that Medicare must only purchase drugs from the domestic market, even if Canadian drugs, for example, were manufactured and packaged in
The second proposal was to prohibit Medicare from negotiating bulk discounts. Medicare just became the largest single purchaser of prescription drugs in the world, and obviously bulk rates would make sense – especially given the low marginal costs of additional pills.
Both pharma-backed proposals to artificially inflate drug costs passed by one vote. Heather “I-play-a-moderate-on-TV” Wilson and Steve “Tom DeLay’s-a-commie-next-to-me” Pearce each voted for the amendments, making each of them directly responsible for hundreds of billions of dollars of additional taxpayer/senior burden. Nothing conservative or compassionate there.
The real story, though, was the man who carried the absurd amendments to bar bulk negotiations and free-market purchases. Louisiana Republican Rep. Billy Tauzin led the GOP in these anti-taxpayer, anti-senior, anti-market battles.
Just days after Tauzin delivered these half-trillion-dollar gifts to the pharmaceutical industry, he did something virtually unheard of: He retired in good health and without indictments, in the middle of his term. Why? To accept a multi-million dollar job lobbying for, you guessed it, pharma.
I don’t intend to imply that any particular New Mexico legislator is even remotely like Tauzin, but pharma, developers, insurance and other trillion-dollar industries play big in New Mexico. Until there’s evidence that our elected leaders are immune from the pressures and incentives that other American politicians feel, why not limit their exposure as much as possible?
Let’s be fair to our legislators and give them a set of rules that remove some of those pressures and incentives. Couple those rules with a salary commensurate with legislators’ long hours of hard work, and you have more trust in our system and fairer treatment of public servants.
Let the sun shine in
Regardless of politics, almost all of us agree that transparency and accountability make for good government. Unfortunately,
Some legislators feel that the public won’t like or appreciate the compromises that are necessary to make legislation. Pretty reasonable concern, and for some voters, that will be true. But I think we underestimate New Mexicans when it’s implied that we can’t understand democracy and compromise.
First, compromise happens all the time in regular committee work and on the floor. Voters, citizens and the press have little trouble understanding that, at times, bills have to be watered down or changed to pass.
Second, open hearings are a chance for legislators to show voters their core beliefs. Instead of a secretive process that leads to gossip and unfounded accusations about who pushed for what and how hard, an open process allows legislators to go on record with their priorities.
Since most legislators tend to represent their district’s priorities well, open conference committees offer an opportunity for them to show what they truly stand for. Under the current system, anything bad gets blamed on all legislators – unfairly – because no one knows anyone’s real positions.
Congress and legislatures in a solid majority of states hold their key deliberations in the warm light of public hearings. Their citizens, press and legislators aren’t better than us. I have faith that our dedicated, decent
Bundy is the political and legislative director for AFSCME in