RALEIGH – A bill to reform North Carolina’s lobbying laws passed its first test last week when a Senate Judiciary Committee approved the measure, which would require full disclosure of lobbying expenditures and limit personal gifts from lobbyists or their clients to $100 per lawmaker per session. The Senate is expected to continue discussion of the legislation this week.

During the committee deliberations, some lawmakers expressed reservations about the scope of the rules. What about an upcoming legislative trip to a nice Asheville hotel next month? The cost, which will be substantial for every member attending, will be picked by the local chamber of commerce. It retains a lobbyist in Raleigh, which would make it subject to the gift limitation.

Is this kind of thing really what lobbying reformers want to nix? I can’t speak for “reformers” as a whole, but in my view the answer to the question is “yes.”

In my view, it is inappropriate for interest groups to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to host, wine, dine, and house legislative or executive-branch officials. Enforcing such a rule might well change the culture in Raleigh, and in North Carolina politics as a whole, but I fail to see why preserving our current political culture should be a priority.

Some defenders of the status quo question whether the state’s business can get done effectively if state officials can’t accept free meals, trips, or NCAA basketball tickets. My answer would be to lob another question back at them: how do they do it in Georgia and South Carolina?

As Kerra Bolton reported recently in the Asheville Citizen Times, Georgia already enforces a gift cap of $100 per legislator plus full disclosure – in other words, rules strikingly similar to the proposal here in North Carolina. In South Carolina, the rules are even more stringent: lobbyists cannot give gifts to public officials or their families at all.

Rumor has it that Georgia and South Carolina have reasonably functioning governments. Some of their state services seem inferior to those in North Carolina, most notably their public-school systems. In other areas, the comparison is less favorable; for example, in new research just published by the John Locke Foundation, the cost-effectiveness of highways in South Carolina (3rd) and Georgia (4th) ranked far higher than those in North Carolina (36th and dropping). Both states have lower Medicaid costs, and South Carolina has a lower tax burden.

Basically, there is little evidence to suggest that South Carolina and Georgia fail to do “the public’s business” effectively because their state lawmakers can’t go to mountain resorts on a lobbyist’s dime. Working within ethical rules, they nevertheless exchange information, debate issues, and fashion public policies. Some of the resulting outcomes are worthy of celebration, others of condemnation, as is the case in North Carolina.

So why have lobbying reform in the first place? Because the process by which we form public policy is important in its own right, quite apart from the outcome it produces. We need to help both lawmakers and lobbyists conduct the public’s business – our business – in a manner that is open, substantive, and as free from temptation as possible.

And certainly if South Carolina can do it, we can (insert gratuitous Gamecocks reference here).

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.