Sunday, February 5, 2012
Arkansas Politics Committee aims to toughen Arkansas ethics law
Posted by Max Brantley on Sun, Feb 5, 2012 at 7:43 AM
- Ozarks Unbound
- CLEAN IT UP: New group would reduce influence of money on politics.
The D-G article noted that legislators, nominally limited to about $14,000 a year in pay, manage to knock down $40,000 to $50,000 through dubiously supported expense reimbursements. Numbers are down this year, thanks to pressure from a number of sources, but they are not down that much when you consider that a lawsuit (of which I'm a part) is certain to eventually end current expense practices that amount to unconstitutional pay enhancements.
Moral: Legislators must be protected from themselves, because they don't have the ethical bearings to do it on their own.
So enter the Regnat Populus 2012 ballot question committee. It filed organizational papers with the state Ethics Commission last week. Its chair, Paul Spencer, a teacher at Catholic High School, talked to me a bit about the work that is underway. A Facebook page and website are in the works and you may be sure I'll provide links when they are ready.
Spencer and a like-minded group of good goverment types — including lawyers, a minister who's been active in the Occupy Little Rock work and many more — hope to organize from the grassroots and through social media a statewide organization to put an ethics law on the ballot in 2012. They'lll need 63,000 signatures by July and hope to gather 80,000 to have some breathing room in the certification process. They don't intend to raise a lot of money for the cause, a sign of their admirable, if perhaps naive, idealism. Spencer said it made no sense to strike a blow against the corrosive influence of money in politics by raising a bunch of money to fight money in politics.
The final draft of the initiative is under review by lawyers and should be submitted to the attorney general within the month. Here are the probable major thrusts:
* WALMART RULE: At last, at last. The law would ban lobbyist spending on legislators. No more drinks. No more steaks. No more trips. If out-of-state junkets are useful to legislators, let them ask for public reimbursement and justify the expenses.
* REVOLVING DOOR: The one-year cooling-off period now in place before a legislator may walk into a fat job as a lobbyist? The law would make it FIVE.
* CORPORATE INFLUENCE: The initiative would make state campaign finance law parallel federal campaign finance law. The biggest difference — THE END OF CORPORATE CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS. In Arkansas, the corporate influence is even more pernicious because the same people can make maximum contributions under the names of multiple corporate shells.
* CITIZENS UNITED: The ballot measure would be styled as a non-binding vote of disapproval against the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling that established corporate personhood in political spending.
Like the sound of this? I do. I can't wait to hear the Chamber of Commerce messages that are devised to explain why these are bad things.
Want to be a part of it? Make suggestions for additions to the initiative. Send an e-mail here: regnatpopuluscfr@gmail.com
You also could drop by the Arkansas Coalition for Peace and Justice meeting at 6 p.m. tonight at the Unitarian-Universalist Church to hear Marie O'Connell talk about the plans.
CORRECTION: I didn't see the e-mail aboout Marie O'Connell's talk until today, but it was sent last night. That session with the Coalition for Peace and Justice was LAST NIGHT. NO MEETING TONIGHT. But there will be others.
PS — If you didn't know, Regnat Populus is the state motto — the people rule. Not corporations.
Speaking of...
-
A futile jab at Citizens United
May 21, 2012Attorney General Dustin McDaniel issued a statement today that he'd joined 22 other a.g.s in asking the U.S. Supreme Court to reconsider its Citizens United decision lifting federal restrictions on corporate campaign spending. /more/
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Smear campaign mounted against ethics initiative
May 21, 2012A surreptitious effort has begun circulating in the Arkansas business community to encourage people not to sign petitions now circulating to improve Arkansas ethics law. /more/
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Tom Cotton shows his colors
April 19, 2012Tom Cotton, Republican candidate for 4th District Congress, has issued a news release boasting about his $10,000 contribution from the PAC of Citizens United. /more/
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Attorney general approves form of ethics proposal
April 4, 2012Regnat Populus 2012, the grassroots movement to stiffen state public ethics law, announced that the attorney general has approved the form of the proposed initiated act. /more/
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Regnat's plan to end railroading
March 21, 2012Progressives broke the railroads' 40-year stranglehold on the Arkansas legislature after the Civil War only once, in 1897, when the legislature dared to refer to the people a constitutional amendment that set up a state agency to regulate the railroads. /more/
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Occupy LR asks for support for good government; rejected
March 16, 2012Occupy Little Rock has, according to reporting in the Democrat-Gazette, floated some ideas about moving its small demonstration encampment to a site less offensive to the eyes of City Director Lance Hines, who wants the blight removed from potential glimpse by speeding I-30 travelers. /more/
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Corporate dominance
March 7, 2012Updates follow on a couple of topics. Though unrelated in the specific, both are directly related to corporate dominance of the people's government. /more/
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Super PACs: A handful of super wealthy take over politics
February 27, 2012It's only further elaboration on the well-established, but I recommend Thomas Edsall's examination of how a handful of super wealthy are exercising inordinate influence over presidential politics with their mammoth contributions to Super PACs. /more/
- More »
Comments (32)
Showing 1-32 of 32
As I recall, during the Clinton governership there were efforts to get the General Assembly to enact similar legislation and failing to do so it was done the same route as this effort. It will pass big time.
like
dislike
Cato - If I recall correctly, that got started with a scandal involving the mayor of North Little Rock who got caught running up huge bills using the city telephone to talk to his cheerleader girlfriend in Fayetteville. It turned out there was no rule against doing that. So the idea started out as an ethics initiative on the executive branch, but then Clinton jumped in and changed it to cover the legislative branch only, thus exempting his own office from similar rules. Clinton is no paragon of ethics, of course, but all of the branches do need some rules.
On this newest group effort, yes they look naïve. Regnat Populus is fine for a state motto, but the Latin is not so good for a campaign name. They don't have an Internet domain name reserved, which is usually a sign that it will probably be another amateurish Facebook-based campaign. And most importantly, there is no mention of improving reporting requirements with immediate electronic filings, and getting the reports into a database for timely, efficient public access and analysis.
I think better public disclosure is more important that imposing the other proposed rules mentioned above. I can live with the SCOTUS Citizens United decision, but we do need better disclosures on radio and television ad expenditures. Those disclosures can be mandated on the basis of using the public airwaves.
Oh boy, another Term Limits type populist movement to save us from ourselves! A collective shirking of responsibility for the outcomes of a system entirely within our control. Don't worry, ma and pa Arkansan, it's not your fault everything isn't exactly the way you want... it's the corporations and the lobbyists, and other evil Others and third-parties.
How many times are we going to attempt engineer our elections and political processes to protect them from imaginary boogeymen before we reach the inexorable conclusion they worked fine and the part that was broken was the citizenry?
All I see here are a bunch of attempts to limit speech that doesn't contain the content you agree with or isn't said by speakers you like. Why don't we throw in a plank that shuts down the AT and ADG and throws Max and Paul Greenberg in jail? They seem to have an inordinate influence on Arkansas politics as well.
What's that? Those corporations and their paid lobbyists are the favored and protected speakers because their's newspapers and journalists? ORLY?
It seems a bit self-serving for you, Max, to be demanding others attempting to influence Arkansas politics to be shut out. Just like how Warren Buffett, who already made his Billions, is demanding all the aspiring Buffetts pay more in taxes on the way up than he did.
I don't have Facebook but I'll certainly be looking out for the website.
I'll gladly sign this ballot and try to get my friends to sign it as well.
Hah. Apparently Mr. West Little Rock is under the impression that "speech" should equal "money." Good luck getting people to agree with that.
Regnat Populus Indeed!
Term limits were a really terrible idea. Overall, they've been a knife in the back of the democratic system.
And a translation of Gyllipus: Lab rats like pellets, and so should you.
Term limits may have been a bad idea, but this is not. We have accepted the current system of institutionalized bribery for far too long. It makes a mockery of representative democracy and drowns out our voices, denying us true representation.
I don't know how many folks on here have been to the state capital when the legislature is in session, but you would see that it is swarming with name-tag wearing registered lobbyists. The average citizen cannot afford to hire a such a person to represent their interests full-time--but with this initiative, perhaps their influence will be mitigated. I for one would like to see a state, a country where the only thing a paid lobbyist can offer a legislator is the strength of their arguments.
The playing field must be leveled. Money must be taken out of politics. True representation must be restored. The stakes could not be higher--I fear that nothing less than the fate of our republic hangs in the balance...
That is a good analogy. If you don't want the rats to get the food, don't change the maze. Take away the food.
Yeah, the Republic has lasted almost 250 years but it's about to fall apart right now unless we keep lobbyists from buying some legislator from Dumas a steak dinner.
You must be a baby boomer to be so ignorant of US political history yet so invested in your own self-importance that you (conveniently) view the time period you happen to be living in to be so seminal.
So there's absolutely nothing wrong with buying a legislator dinner when seeking to influence their vote?
I have another suggestion about restrictions on money. Let's make a rule that campaigns can only accept contributions from registered voters in the district for the office where the candidate is running. That would fairly eliminate corporate contributions, out-of-state contributions, and other nefarious influences. The county clerks or the Secretary of State would provide the voter registration data to the campaigns to be checked before accepting the contributions.
If Lobbyist John Doe didn't buy Representative James a steak dinner before James was elected, Doe shouldn't be allowed to buy him a dinner after he's elected. The same for a shotgun or a bass boat or a boatload of Velveeta, if the lobbyist didn't have a history of giving the self esteemed worthy gifts before he became a worthy then giving gifts now is bribery plain & simple.
>>protect them from imaginary boogeymen <
Goodness, the Chamber skipped church this morning.
It's good to see the alignments happening so soon.
Imagine what the nation could have done in 250 years without any rules!
Yeah, and I nailed an easy tenbagger on the ArkBlog troll ratings.
WINNING!
If the Chamber really thinks Regnat Populus will grow teeth there's a time tested,
easy solution:
http://www.activistpost.com/2012/02/diebol…
I rate your troll only a 7/10, mostly for using an argument that has no basis in reality.
A good troll can be logically defended. While you may be able to defend bribing legislators, you cannot logically defend it.
If ChamberBoi can be made to work on Sunday morning for Chamber wages
then expect little logic or reason from it.
You can't imagine what happens to a Boi's mind once the Raging Elephant has humped them all the way to the colon.
Also, I'd say troll rating is now at least 9/10 after successful derailment.
http://memegenerator.net/cache/instances/4…
If anyone needs an idea of how fast this Amendment is going to pass look at the recent ethics law in the U.S. Senate following the "60 Minutes" expose on insider trading.
It passed 96-3, quickly.
Do Arkansas Legies poll higher approval than Congress' 13%? About the same? Lower?
Excuse me, but doesn't "Arkansas ethics law" verge on the oxymoronic?
No, my judgments are final. 7/10. And that was assuming you were an amateur.
If I would have known you were a paid Chamber of Commerce troll, your rating would have been 1/10. Better step up that game -- or you'll be a reminder to us of how unemployment can in fact be deserved and not just something your owners do to increase earnings.
Rules prohibit scoring your own troll, nimrod. But really trying to defend the status quo? Where are your austerity genes? You enjoy being screwed ethically and with taxpayer dollars?
Right, you're already on the public dole if you are a Chamber boy.
I am so glad that we may finally be able to take back control of our own state government... I am wishing for the greatest success in this venture..!!!
eLwood asks, "Do Arkansas Legies poll higher approval than Congress' 13%? About the same? Lower?"
That's a really good question. I figured the poll done up at UA-Fayetteville would have that data if anyone would, but then I thought again: The Arkansas Legislature pays their bills.
Okay, not true. I only thought that after I saw they didn't ask that question, and it was an unfair inference to make. But I still don't know the answer to eLwood's question.
Why not ban all PAID lobbying? Why should certain groups or rich people be able to have more influence over legislators? If a group or individual wants to lobby legislators, let them do it themselves on their own time like the rest of the people.
The Arkansas Legislature pays their bills.<<
Hmmm? Could one read that as "prepaid bills?"
The obvious omission in this proposal is a law barring anyone with a direct financial interest to serve on a commission regulating the activity in question. For example, why do we continue to allow the Oil and Gas commission to be dominated by commissioners that reap direct financial benefit from their own decisions governing businesses they are supposedly charged with regulating? If we are truly going to reclaim our democracy, our health, and the health of our environment, this truck sized loophole in our "ethics law" must be corrected.
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