The call last week by Assembly members Bill Baroni and Alex DeCroce for a special legislative session to develop and approve anti-corruption legislation should be heeded. If not with a special session, then with real, bipartisan ethical reform.
While some are dismissing it as nothing more than politics — and make no mistake, there is a whole lot of politics involved here — the fact is that the corruption they are pointing to exists and it is incumbent upon legislators to rein it in.
Last week, state Sen. Wayne Bryant, a Camden County Democat, became the latest in a long line of high-profile state officials, along with a bevy of lower-level officials (housing officials in Passaic County, zoning officials in Monmouth County), to face indictment. Like former state Sen. President John Lynch — the Middlesex County Democratic power broker who pleaded guilty last year to federal corruption charges — Sen. Bryant is accused of abusing his office. In his case, he’s been accused of trading a no-show job with the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey in exchange for his steering of grant money to the school.
The problem is greater than Sen. Bryant or former Sen. Lynch — far greater, of course, than any individual politician. It is systemic, a product of a state tradition that allows New Jersey’s elected officials to hold more than one public job, creating a nexus of influence that encourages, in the words of Alfred Doblin, editorial page editor of The Record of Hackesnack, the “regular exchange of ‘Christmas’ presents among legislators, local elected officials and organizations with financial ties to state and local governments.”
Doblin, in a column on Monday, blames the double-dipper — the elected official who holds multiple, interwined public jobs — but also the political status quo, which has done very little to change the system. And this goes for both political parties — Bryant, Lynch, James Treffinger and all the others have been getting away with things for too long.
Wayne Bryant was in the Legislature for a long time. Are voters supposed to believe that no other legislators or their staffs had an inkling of what was going on? That’s as improbable as being told that no one in Trenton knew former Gov. Jim McGreevey was gay. Either the folks in Trenton are dim or we are.
Hence, the call for reforms by the Republicans.
“We are at a critical mass of corruption in New Jersey,” Assemblyman Baroni said last week. And it is difficult to argue. Voters believe that New Jersey politicians are on the take — and too many are.
Are the Republicans manipulating the issue? Of course. Did the Democrats do the same in Congress with the Abramoff scandal, and are they doing the same thing now with the firing of the U.S. attorneys? Yes. But that does not mean that scandals were not real.
Framing the issue as a purely political question obscures that corruption has become a fact of life in New Jersey for both sides and that the Democrats, by virtue of their status as the majority party, have a responsibility to do something aobut it.
The package of bills being pushed by the GOP has some interesting and useful suggestions — an end to double-dipping and pay-to-play reforms — and deserves a hearing.
The governor already has signed legislation sponsored by Assembly Democrat John Adler that imposes tough sanctions on lawmakers who violate ethical standards. But the Democrxatic majority has been slow to enact a real ban on dual-office holding and double-dipping and to create tougher pay-to-play restrictions and clamp down on contractors and developers. They have an opportunity now to fix a broken system — to expand the clean elections program, give the state comptroller some real powers and create a corruption czar in the AG’s office among them.
There are a lot of potential reforms that could alter the climate here. We shouldn’t let politics get in the way.
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Hank Kalet 