May 2010
May 27, 2010
(Syndicated to Kansas newspapers May 24, 2010)Trying to close a loophole
Friday, just moments after the House and Senate officially adjourn for the 2010 legislative session, it becomes open season on legislative lobbyists, corporations, banks and unions.
That open season is the ability of legislators to legally ask those specific classes of folks with checkbooks for campaign contributions.
That’s the bright yellow line that will be breached when lawmakers are officially out of session for the year. The concept is that you really don’t want legislators to ask lobbyists for money while there is still business that may help them or their clients on the floor of the House and Senate. That makes sense. Nobody wants legislators to essentially sell—or maybe lease—their votes to the highest bidders.
Policing that sort of thing is why we have a Kansas Governmental Ethics Commission. But, we’re seeing that after decades of watching election campaign finance, there are still issues that Ethics is struggling to get its hands around.
One was considered last week, and the principle is that if you want to contribute money to a candidate you ought to take responsibility for it. Somewhere, the name of a contributor should be available for the public to see and consider…well, if this guy is giving money to that candidate, I wonder why?
Ethics last week tried with adoption of a formal rule to close one of those loopholes that allow near-confidential contributions to specific candidates, under cover of contributing money to a political party. The rule is that no one can give money to a candidate that comes from an unidentified person.
The concept as it has worked in the past is that you could contribute money to a political party at the state or local level with the understanding that the party organization would hand it to a specific candidate. All the recordkeeping shows just the contribution to the party, and someone on the inside of the party gives the money to the specific candidate.
The contributor leaves no DNA on the contribution.
Now, there are contributors who just send money to a state or county party organization and don’t put formal strings on it, just to help the party of their choice. Nothing wrong with being a good Republican or a good Democrat and helping your party. But that’s different than directing the party to use your money for a specific candidate.
The concept is probably a fair one if you believe in transparency and seeing just who is giving money to whom and trying to figure out why.
But the problem, of course, is that the party organization may just claim that there was no direction of funds, no wink-and-nod agreement to send money to a specific candidate.
That’s the problem with all of this good-intentioned transparency—making it work.
And nope, besides just asking party leaders there’s no real way for those contributions to be linked to a specific candidate. It will depend on self-reporting (a mole in county or state party leadership?) to make it work.
Because last time we checked, Ethics can’t waterboard a party official.
May 20, 2010
(Syndicated to Kansas newspapers May 17, 2010)Let’s take it outdoors…
You may not notice it from just across the street—or across the state—but there is a fierce battle under way in the Legislature, one that sprawled from the just-adjourned session into the upcoming elections.
The fight? It’s between the long well-respected lobbying organization, the Kansas Chamber of Commerce, and the upstart Kansas Economic Progress Council.
Now, everyone has heard about the Chamber, there’s a local chamber in nearly every city and town, and most of those local organizations and many of their business members also belong to the Chamber. It’s where business hangs out, or used to.
The KEPC? It’s new, and heading into this legislative session, it took the position that—like the Chamber—it didn’t favor tax increases, but moderated that stance, essentially telling legislators that if it’s necessary to increase taxes a dab to maintain important services, go ahead and do it.
Tax increases? The Chamber characterized them as for programs and agencies feeding “at the government trough” and asserted that legislators who voted for higher taxes were throwing businesses, the engine of the state’s economy, “under the bus.”
The chamber also opposed a new 10-year transportation program because after the 1-cent sales tax it opposed is cut to just a .4-cent per dollar tax, that money goes to the Kansas Department of Transportation to build roads.
The KEPC? It was OK with the taxes because it means maintaining the state’s roads at levels that encourage commerce.
The scrap? Well, so far, the Chamber has lost, KEPC has won. But that’s just inside the Statehouse.Now, after the initial scrap, the battle goes to the polls. The Chamber will be supporting candidates who didn’t—or who say they won’t—raise taxes and the Chamber has a large campaign warchest with which to help finance those campaigns. KEPC? No political action committee…yet. And it’s hard to generate popular support for lawmakers who raised taxes, even if those taxes were essential to maintaining schools, services to the poor, veterans and the disabled. The reason is relatively simple. Most of us don’t attend public schools, most of us aren’t veterans, are poor or have disabilities.
Real issue now is whether either side can convince the public that it made Kansas better, or its advice was ignored and the state will suffer for it. Do good schools bring business—and jobs—to Kansas, or do low taxes bring those jobs? Because, in the long view, the goal of both organizations is to make Kansas a business-friendly state, where you and your kids and their kids can get jobs, make a nice living and enjoy a good life.
It’s going to be interesting this campaign season to see how that pans out. Do we vote against people who raised the sales tax, or do we vote for people who financed the state government that we have? Or, do we have too much state government, too many programs, too much of our money going to government for things and programs that we really don’t use, or do those services make Kansas a better place for business and industry, once those workers go home from the plant or office or store and move around the community?
This was a big fight inside the Statehouse. Now, it’s time to take it outdoors…
May 13, 2010
(Syndicated to Kansas newspapers May 10, 2010)Brochure-building in the House
There were hours on the floor of the Kansas House last week when you could, with just a dab of imagination shaped by watching politics for more than 30 years, envision campaign brochures being written for the upcoming elections.
What?
Yes, after Democrats and moderate Republicans had wrested control of the biggest appropriations bill of the year from the House’s conservative leadership, it was time to turn to thoughts of reelection campaigns this fall.
You build a campaign brochure with things that you have done that you think will appeal to your voter base, and you try to make your opponents vote—in a roll call vote that you can point to as “official”—against things that you think voters like.
That’s building a campaign brochure. And the conservative Republicans who saw their proposed state budget hijacked in favor of the Democrat/moderate Republican bill did just that.
Conservative Republicans who are tight-fisted when they have control of the House turned fiscal liberals when they lost control of the bill and then turned to big-spending to make their opponents reject their amendments. The Democrat/GOP mods, to keep their budget bill balanced, had to vote against some very voter-friendly amendments.
There were amendments to spend more money on veterans, more on the elderly, more on the poor and more on some local-interest issues in some districts, like reopening a prison with its attendant economic and employment bonanza for one House district.
Would you like to attend a campaign forum at the local Veterans of Foreign Wars post having voted against spending more money for the Soldiers’ Home? Probably not. How about an AARP candidate forum when you’ve voted not to put even more money into the congregate meals program, or Meals on Wheels?
See where this goes?
And if there was one aspect to hours of debate and dozens of amendments, it was the persistence of the faction that had lost control of the budget bill to continue to try to find a way to break the dominant Democrat/moderate Republican solidarity. It was reminiscent of letting the dog out in the backyard. The dog will spend hours testing the fence to see if there’s a weak spot through which it can get out of the yard. That’s how dogs are, and that’s how diligent representatives are when they are losing ground and trying to bust up the voting bloc that has built the fence.
Now, conservative Republicans didn’t invent this. For years, when House Democrats stood alone as a minority, unable to do much to make policy, they offered up their own amendments to “put Republicans on record” against really nice things. More money for teachers, for veterans, for the elderly and the sick and the poor. Had there been a way for Democrats to force Republicans to vote against motherhood, the flag and ice cream, they’d have done it. That’s the politics of roll call votes on amendments to bills on the House floor.
Not exactly your first thought when considering textbook good government, but that’s how it’s done here in the Statehouse…
May 6, 2010
(Syndicated to Kansas newspapers May 3, 2010)Jobs saved!
For all the excitement—and the Kansas Legislature tends to get excited easily—the Legislature’s lap dance with…well, lap dancing, appears to be over for the year.
The bill, the “community protection act” which essentially substituted the Legislature’s judgment on what’s right and proper and decent for communities with adult entertainment businesses for that of local units of government, appears dead for the session.
And while there was some vicarious thrill, or maybe not-so-vicarious if you know some legislators, in talking about strip joints, lawmakers decided by just one vote out of 165 that this was something that the Legislature probably ought not mess with.
After all, the communities that have these adult entertainment facilities know where they are. The crowd that spends its money on adult entertainment knows where the joints are, and they’re pretty much out of sight, out of mind for most Kansans.
If you don’t care for that adult entertainment, well, you just don’t go there. It’s not like school districts organize educational tours of the places.
But one of the more interesting facets of the debate over whether the state should essentially shut down the joints was a little-noticed sideline.
Seems, according to a guy who owns a number of those adult entertainment facilities (doesn’t that sound more businesslike than “strip joints”), the community protection act would put about 2,500 Kansans out of work. That’s exotic dancers, bartenders, bouncers, and whoever else works in those places.
Surprisingly, a totally separate economic study showed that a 1-cent sales tax increase would cost about 1,900 Kansans their jobs. Seems that the percolating effect of a penny sales tax would reverberate through the Kansas economy with less economic intensity than the loss of some bump-and-grind.
That, of course, is based on whose economic projections you want to believe, or whether you want to believe any of them, or whether you are going to discount one projection in favor of another. That’s what legislators do: Take in information and figure out whether they believe it or not.
Not surprisingly, the economic development groups opposing raising the sales tax for fear it would cost Kansas jobs didn’t line up to oppose the strip club-closing bill, which apparently would also cost Kansas jobs. After all, there are businesses and then there are those businesses.
Obliquely, it appeared that most legislators didn’t want to compare the jobs in the adult entertainment industry with those of, say, construction workers or doctors or schoolteachers or the people who mix sugar into soda pop for our kids.
Strange things happen at the Statehouse toward the end of the session.
Best part: At some point, the legislators return to their homes, and we have all summer to talk about what they did, what they didn’t do and how we care to spin it.