(December 1, 2000) One of the fundamental lessons in politics is to learn that there's the way things look and then the way things are. If you can control how things look, then you can pretty much do what you want.
That's what maintains business as usual in Annapolis. Leadership controls what information people can have, and with spin on their side, corruption remains a way of life. Oh, we have some outstanding legislators of integrity too, but lately they're a minority in the General Assembly, overpowered by chronic, inflamed Glendenoids.
What are examples of how perception and reality differ? Take the annual 90 day legislative session. Most citizens think the fundamental decisions considering bills are made after the January start in session. Actually, leadership makes its deals well ahead of session on what central measures it will advance. Themes for the 2001 session are being worked out now, and except for some little bills in the noise, the session itself is chiefly choreography.
It appears most of the deals concerning redistricting have been worked out too. (Why else would Senate President Mike Miller be creating a paper trail of requests for Attorney General opinions, as he has, if not to flesh out plans for carving up the state?) Most folks think the census is supposed to direct redistricting every ten years, but in fact all that does is give the specific figures to be used as justification for what pols already want to do.
Pols must work harder to do what they want when reality accidentally leaks into the spin. Examples of corruption became public this year, so leadership must arrange for the usual debate over diversionary legislation. Committees will agonize over why a $15 gift desk set given to a legislator should be reported but a $5 coffee mug may not.
Know this: no campaign or ethics reform will pass under this leadership until they figure out how the proposal can be scammed to protect incumbents. Debate over $5 coffee mugs is to keep you from treading near to the important matters. It's intended to keep control of spin so reality can be taken care of by leadership.
And that brings us to the point of this article. What would constitute reform in Annapolis?
We all know what firearm owners really want, of course: restoration of our right to carry, for example, and how about getting rid of the many mickey-mouse technical restrictions on firearms - all of them solutions to problems that never existed - that MSP uses to wage its war on lawful firearm ownership on behalf of the administration.
But you and I both know none of that is going to happen until we institute real reform: you know, the kind voters do at the ballot box, electing legislators of integrity into the majority, who won't shill for the likes of Glendening.
In the mean time, the question of what would constitute real reform deserves a real answer. Appended below is a list of the top ten reforms affecting quality of information in Annapolis that leadership will love to hate.
1. Make it a crime to give or suborn false testimony to the legislature. General Assembly hearings should be driven by information, not propaganda. We'd love to limit damage which is done by false or misleading testimony from proponents of left wing social engineering. Legislation proposing this change has been submitted in the past, yet always killed in committee. Leadership doesn't want decision makers confused by truth.
2. Mandate publication of a criminal background check on all candidates for public office. Everyone already agrees that sunshine is the best way to remedy potential conflicts of interest. Officials who have potential conflicts in any of a variety of civil matters must already inform the public what those are, so voters can make an informed decision. We should expand the scope of these laws to address conflicts in criminal matters, not just civil matters. The public has a right to know whether someone voting on gun control legislation is not eligible to possess a gun, for example, and we'd surely take a strong interest if the governor was about to appoint a judge with his own history of domestic violence. The potential damage done by officials run amok justifies our knowing their history.
3. Give teeth to the Public Information Act (or "PIA.") Government officials are required to make available to the public information which we, as tax payers, own. Critical insights about how government works (or doesn't in some cases) can only be gained when we can see for ourselves - we're the ultimate 'auditor' of what government does on our behalf. The PIA is routinely abused and ignored by officials at the highest levels. We need to make it a real crime with real consequences for a government official to withhold or impede access to information. Timely and full disclosure is needed, penalties for violation must be in place and courts should expedite the handling of alleged violations. An independent agency to assist citizens in checking the integrity of government officials could be established, charged with monitoring and publishing information about how well our state government works.
4. Give teeth to the state sunshine law. Open meetings are already required of state agencies. Right now there is no penalty for a violation (in the words of one assistant state's attorney, findings of a violation are 'advisory.') We need state officials to know that shenanigans done under the auspices of their office must be out for the public to see. We can only be the ultimate check in a system of checks and balances if we can know what is going on.
5. Audit all legislative fiscal notes. Each bill proposed to the General Assembly goes through a hearing process before committees. As part of this process, Legislative Services prepares a "fiscal note" for each bill, wherein legislators are given a simplified description of the proposal along with a statement of the potential effect (e.g., it predicts the cost to the state of passing this legislation.) Currently only budget mavens well-versed in a deep and arcane funding system can ever tell whether budget predictions become true, and nobody ever goes back after the fact to see whether the social impact matches predictions. Since fiscal notes are already prepared for legislature, we should ensure that the administration retains them when bills become law so they are carried forward through the regulation and implementation. Officials and citizens alike have an interest in tracking how well predictions match reality, both in terms of the budget and of predicted social effect. This is all based on a simple engineering truism: You can't improve a system if you can't see or measure the effect of your actions. We should ensure information about the effect of new laws is preserved and presented for public use.
A step in this direction could simply be done as a change in policy: bill proponents could be asked to prepare a separate statement of testable impact of their proposal. Bill preambles already state the ostensible goals of a new law, but almost never do they say so in a way that would allow an independent observer to recognize when those goals are achieved. This is understandable; proponents don't want to be tied to ideas that can objectively be seen as having failed. Requiring legislators to boldly state testable success criteria would be new to politics, but not to business, where executives routinely consider on how well proponents and their ideas have fared in the past. It's a basic principle of quality assurance in running an organization.
[Of course, leadership doesn't want this. Left wing social engineers who make bold predictions about things like gun control will quickly lose credibility when the public sees how their previous notions are actually used. Right now liberals are free to use the same statistics and same arguments - in some cases we've seen, even the same documents from word processors - to pass each new law. Accountability would expose them for what they are.]
6. Expand the scope of what the people can bring to referendum. Let the people challenge more budget bills (currently most budget items are out of scope of referendum) and moreover let us do it at the line item level. We will soon see how interested voters are in some of the left wing social engineering experiments now being funded.
7. Publish each year's final budget - the actual spending - on the Internet. This information already exists, but is largely hidden from the public. It should be consolidated and memorialized in a highly accessible format. We'd like to give each voter a personalized listing of named programs from the previous fiscal year, showing how much of their taxes went into each program. Voters cannot become educated and informed about our society if we don't even know the names of programs we're funding. This is the information age: let's personalize and publish information already owned by the people.
8. Maintain and publish audit information of the judicial system. Again this is information that already exists but is not consolidated. The track record of judges and other decision makers in the justice system should be open for all to see. The next time a known child molester is released to kill a child in Frederick, or a known drug dealer is out on the street to kill a state trooper, the public should be able to instantly see who in the justice system last handled the case. Many judges must run "against their record" for reelection every ten years, yet in our current system there is no way for the public to independently know what that record is. That is an information age sin!
9. Maintain and publish audit information on use of existing laws. How often is any given entry in the 'Code of Maryland' used as basis for some charge? How many convictions for same? What were other dispositions? Leadership has actively killed initiatives that would have allowed this information to be collected, specifically in the area of gun control laws. To them, it would be a shame for the public to discover which laws were passed just for show and which are really being perverted to other uses. If it is a good law that the people support, then it will withstand scrutiny and likely please the public.
10. Ban tax dollars' use in fighting or arguing a referendum of the people. Any legislation that is passed by the General Assembly and signed into law should stand on its own before the people to judge. State officials and employees should not need to argue or advocate a position further, at least at taxpayer expense.