RALEIGH – Do reform-oriented lawmakers and activists mean what they say when advocating measures to make legislative deliberations more open, fair, and, well, deliberative?
That’s a key question to ponder as the 2006 legislative session unfolds. As Gary Robertson of the Associated Press reports, it is evident that House Speaker Jim Black and Senate leader Marc Basnight, stung by the allegations and investigations of the past year, have made some significant changes. For example, in years past lawmakers seeking taxpayer funds for critically needed, economic-development bonanzas in their home districts (i.e. pork) lobbied to get the projects slipped into the general budget bill, either by name or as an implied recipient of a pot of discretionary funds. This year, both leaders told their members that each spending request would have to enter the chamber openly, in the form of a bill. As a result, they’ve filed some 4,900 bills. The last time that happened, North Carolinians were still reading about the sinking of the Titanic the previous spring.
Which may be an apt metaphor for some. I’ve heard lots of grumbling among lawmakers, lobbyists, and political observers about what they see as cataclysmic. How can the General Assembly possibly consider so many different bills in a “short” session that leaders hope to wrap up in mid-July? How many members and local constituencies will see their hopes publicly dashed as it becomes plain that the vast majority of these bills have little chance of passage? Perhaps it was better the old way, some are whispering – at least it was tidier.
There’s a larger issue here about government reform. The cause is currently in vogue in Raleigh, for obvious reasons. But the political class hasn’t quite bought the underlying argument. Many see the need for reform as essentially political, as justified by public disaffection or media pressure, but not justified by outcomes. They would argue that the last several years of last-minute budgets and backroom deals may not have been pretty, but that they have yielded praiseworthy results.
Quite apart from the obvious debatable matter of whether repeated tax increases, state-run gambling, pork-barrel portliness, and regulatory malfeasance should qualify as praiseworthy results, this sentiment rather misses the point. Government is, or should be, about more than simply getting what you want at any particular point in time. The trick that slips your favorite bill pass a deadline today, or gets the provision you most hate out of the state budget tonight, may end up passing something you find truly abhorrent tomorrow. Moreover, the founders of America and North Carolina did not believe they were creating governmental structures that would pass as many bills as possible to please as many interest groups as possible. They believed they were creating governmental structures that would fund and operate core services but be extremely slow to change public policies or create new state endeavors.
Honest, open, fair, deliberative government will inevitably be slow, messy government. It will be frustrating. You’ll have to listen repeatedly to the ponderous pontification of your least-favorite lawmaker. You’ll have to work hard, for a long time, to push your ideas through committees to the floor, then to the other chamber, then to the governor. You’ll have to object to unwise provisions openly, subjecting them to amendment and debate, not have them quietly killed in between rounds at the golf course.
To apply the principle this year: advocates of a minimum-wage increase need to be prepared to see it defeated if the only way it can pass the NC Senate is as a special provision of the budget bill. The same goes for advocates of video-poker bans or tax cuts – they should be prepared to uphold the integrity of the process, even if it does not immediately yield the outcomes they like.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.