Charles Stile in The Record touches on a note similar to the one I strike in my own column today: the unlikelihood that the Legislature will pass real reforms.
Governor Corzine has promised a renewed agenda on the issue this year, and so have leaders of the Legislature. But Corzine’s State of the State speech next week will be almost solely devoted to his plan to restructure state debt by raising tolls. That obsession will probably eat up much of his agenda this year. And he is not likely to do something dramatic, such as extend New Jersey’s pay-to-play ban with a sweeping executive order, which has been pushed by campaign finance advocates.
There will be little appetite or time for sweeping reforms this year. Besides, the Democratic leadership is not inclined to unilaterally level the playing field just because their Republican counterparts say it’s the right thing to do.
Senate President Dick Codey is a cautious incrementalist, not a firebrand reformer. Assembly Speaker Joe Roberts wants to “put everything on the table” for discussion and also talks of a future in which all legislative contests operate under “clean elections” guidelines. Sounds intriguing, but I suspect we’ll see a raft of smaller reforms while we wait for the full realization of his utopian vision.
Stile then offers some interesting ideas — “small, albeit important steps that lawmakers can take this year that could serve as critical building blocks of reform”:
Require candidates and campaign committees to spend most of their contributions on their own races. This would limit sending — or “wheeling” — large blocks of money from one part of the state to another. Shrewd contributors donate to several county committees and races, with the hope (and tacit understanding) that it will be spent for some of the sky’s-the-limit battles. But the practice allows donors to evade contribution limits and makes party leaders indebted to special interests who pay the tab. Codey has talked about passing a law that plainly states that “wheeling” is illegal. That’s not enough.
Limit the amount of money legislative leaders can spend on races. There was something surreal last year in watching legislative leaders wiring World Bank-sized loans to pay for life-and-death power struggles in the wilderness of Cape May and Cumberland counties. The only ones who benefited were political consultants, who got a percentage for the cost of producing all those negative mailers and television ads. I know this is wishful thinking, but I don’t feel the panel that promoted the creation of these legislative leadership committees in 1993 envisioned giving them this kind of corporate power to raise and spend money. Ban state contractors from making donations to legislative leaders. The pay-to-play ban prohibits donors from receiving lucrative state contracts if they gave contributions to the governor or to the campaign accounts controlled by the governor’s party, such as county committees. But donors get around that by giving to legislative leaders, who are exempt from the ban. Close the loophole in the state pay-to-play ban that exempts politically connected law firms, engineers, architects and other professional services. Technically, the ban does restrict these firms from getting state work, but it only forbids principals who hold at least a 10 percent equity stake in the firm. That allows firms’ partners and associates to continue giving without fear of penalty.
These are intriguing reforms that, absent the larger changes needed, could keep the notion of ethics on the table.
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Hank Kalet 