Lawmakers make few real reforms

==Lawmakers have made few real reforms==
: By Peter DeCoursey, Bureau Chief, Capitolwire
====Chambersburg Public Opinion====
HARRISBURG -- When legislative leaders talk about reform, three words come
up a lot: "procedure" and "access" and "openness."
They say that judging by those criteria, the Legislature has come a long way
in the last year. And, if those are your criteria, that is true.
It is far easier to get expense records for lawmakers now. We have a
lobbying disclosure law that is far weaker than the federal law, but at
least we finally have one.
When the House voted on a transportation bill last summer, leaders and
Deputy Speaker Josh Shapiro, D-Montgomery, hailed the fact that new House
rules meant House members had time to read the bill before debating it.
That didn't used to happen, of course. And being able to read and digest a
bill before voting on it, when it adds tolls to a major highway and could
raise tolls on the Pennsylvania Turnpike by 50 percent within seven years,
is crucial to the democratic process.
Of course, the usual suspects on both sides voted as they would have if it
had been the bad old days and they hadn't read the bill, but still it's good
they had the chance.
The House also proved, confounding the predictions of many lobbyists and
insiders, that bills could be passed even if members, lobbyists and actual
experts could read them first.
There is other progress: There are a jillion records, reports, committee
actions and other things that you can now get on the Internet or will be
able to get on the Internet soon, that you couldn't get before without
delays rivaling those of the old Soviet bureaucracy.
And there seems to be determination on all sides to pass a new state open
records law, and to apply it to the Legislature, not just to county and
municipal governments and school districts. Even better, it seems as if the
new law will presume records are open - albeit with something like 26
exceptions - rather than closed, as the law presumes now.
So why do so many critics persist, and why are these actions not hailed as
reform?
Because so little has changed. While lawmakers and the governor answered
questions during budget negotiations, questions about whether education
would get another $200 million or whether other programs would get $50
million here or $75 million there were waved off with comments like "I'm not
going to get into details." Hey, it's not like it's the people's money and
they might like to know, or anything. The legislative leaders are pretending
to be OB/GYNs, but unlike new babies, budgets don't have to be layered over
with gunk and kept away from the public. The Legislature just prefers to
decide how to spend your money in private.
When the new House rules prevented amendments right before bills were
passed, they were hailed as a big change. And they would have been, if
uniformly observed.
But those rules were followed, um, unless the bills involved state
infrastructure spending projects or the rules were inconvenient on the last
two days of the budget session. Then they were ignored.
How much change is that?
As one critic griped: "Finding out quicker by e-mail and Internet that they
are doing the same old crap is not the kind of change the folks who ejected
24 state lawmakers and a Supreme Court justice were asking for."
Reform is not about a better-ventilated same-old process. Shapiro was asked
Monday at the Pennsylvania Press Club luncheon for evidence that, as he
claimed, the reforms gave more power to the House and took it from the
leaders. And there are several procedural ways in which that has occurred,
including taking away the power of the House Rules Committee to
substantively amend legislation.
But he chose the transportation bill as his example, which is ironic,
because while House lawmakers did get to read it, that is all the House got
to do with it. It was conceived by the Senate, then the House version was
de-Housed completely by the Senate. And that was done so late the House had
no choice but to pass the Senate version, protecting the Senate's patronage
haven, the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission, from the House.
If that is empowerment, most House members would prefer less of it.
Plus, there is not much hope the House will pass further property tax
reduction or campaign finance donation limits or toughen the lobbying
disclosure law or enact PHEAA reform or turnpike reform or term limits or
reduce the size of the Legislature or reduce legislative account surpluses
or reform the cozy, insular, incumbent-protecting legislative redistricting
system.
Even modest further proposals for transparency, like making campaigns reveal
their donations far more often, seem to be going nowhere.
Even the optimistic Shapiro says he will change his mind and tout a
constitutional convention if major reforms like campaign finance reform and
others are not enacted by the end of 2008.
But since such reforms are unlikely in a re-election year, they really have
about two months to get done. Which means it is unlikely -- bordering on
impossible -- that real change will happen in Shapiro's time frame.
And that will remain true as long as lawmakers believe voters are now over
their pay-raise, anti-Legislature revulsion that defeated 24 lawmakers at
the polls in 2006, and led to 30 retirements.
So unless most of the seven statewide judges up for retention this fall
lose, or dozens of county-level retention judges lose, lawmakers will
continue to assume voters have finally returned to their pre-pay-raise
apathy.
In which case, little more disclosure will come, much less real change.
http://www.publicopiniononline.com/opinion/ci_7113994
==Links==
* Reform
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