RALEIGH – At the beginning of the 2006 legislative session, leaders of the North Carolina House and Senate said clearly and publicly that they heard and understood the widespread public concern about ethical standards, influence-peddling, and official misdeeds in state government. Now we know it was talk, nothing but talk. They did not hear, and certainly did not understand, what the uproar was about. They do not believe there is anything substantially wrong with the manner they have been conducting the public’s business. They were not at all willing to accept responsibility and fashion comprehensive, comprehensible, and common-sense rules governing ethics and lobbying.
Here’s how the situation looks on the eve of the legislature’s adjournment. Faced with heightened public scrutiny and political pressure to tighten ethical guidelines, majorities in both the House and Senate seem poised to loosen said guidelines, to make it easier to accept valuable gifts from lobbyists and conduct ethics hearings out of the public eye than current law allows. On the other hand, lawmakers have tightened some state regulations – but on their critics, not on themselves. In a disgusting display of the very procedural shenanigans for which legislative leaders have justly earned obloquy – “amending” unrelated bills at the last minute to shove new and dangerous provisions through the legislature with little public discussion – they have attempted to gag independent political organizations who exercise their members’ First Amendment freedom of speech to criticize public officials, while creating new categories of private citizens and organizations to which they apply intrusive regulations not just during, say, the last 30 or 60 days of an election, but for virtually the entire year leading up to an election.
The problem, according to these state lawmakers, has not been the misbehavior or poor judgment of legislative staffers and leaders, up to and including House Speaker Jim Black and former House Co-Speaker Richard Morgan. The problem has been outside groups who criticized Black, Morgan, and others.
It takes a monumental arrogance to read recent political events this way. Unfortunately, monumental arrogance is exactly the proper term to describe the mood at the General Assembly.
As I wrote about just a couple of days ago, and close observers of the legislature have confirmed to me since, House and Senate members are deeply resentful at even having to discuss the issue of ethics and lobbying reform. They see the entire discussion as constituting a collective admission of guilt in a scandalous enterprise. There is an injustice here, actually, but the perpetrators of the injustice – to dutiful lawmakers, Democrat and Republican, who conduct themselves with dignity and legislate with sober argument, not back-room deals – are the very legislative leaders who are again leading their chambers astray.
From what I know of the “compromise” package on ethics and lobbying being voted on shortly, it is a step backwards, not forwards. The lack of action on key issues such as a true ban on personal gifts to lawmakers from lobbyists is bad enough, but what’s worse is what the General Assembly has chosen to act on: measures designed to muzzle outside critics. These measures will not succeed, I suspect – they are so poorly drafted as to be problematic to enforce, and if enforced they will likely be challenged successfully as violating basic constitutional rights. Still, it is telling that leaders responded to the hottest political issue in contemporary North Carolina politics not by listening to the message but instead by trying to silence some of the messengers.
Surprising? Not really. Disappointing? Really.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.
Update: After I wrote this piece late Wednesday evening, lawmakers worked into the wee hours tweaking the aforementioned bill and improved it a bit. They took out problematic language that would potentially have forced a wide variety of public-policy groups and media organizations register as “solicitors” and file reports whenever they discussed public issues via publications or events. The new language limits the solicitation rules to specific communications by lobbying groups to voters urging them to call their lawmakers and expressly advocate the defeat or passage of a bill or a particular executive decision. Good — the original language was idiotic and unconstitutional.
Unfortunately, other questionable provisions survived, including overly broad exemptions from the ban on gifts to lawmakers. My fellow Coalition for Lobbying Reform colleague and sparring partner, Chris Fitzsimon, explains further in his latest column.