Pro & Con: Should Georgia adopt a $100 cap on gifts from lobbyists?

YES: Lawmakers should pay their own way, just like everybody else.

By William Perry and Bob Irvin

The new Georgia Alliance for Ethics Reform — composed of Common Cause, Tea Party Patriots, Georgia Watch and Ray Boyd — has proposed a $100 cap on lobbyist gifts to state and local elected officials, as well as their staffs and families, specifically including travel.

We’re not trying to eliminate ordinary business meetings to discuss legislation. We’re trying to end free product samplers, Super Bowl tickets, golf weekends, fishing and hunting expeditions, and overseas “fact finding” trips that are all just junkets in disguise.

We want to cut them off because they’re corrupting. Perhaps not in the narrow sense of bribery where in return for receipt of a thing of value, officials make decisions they would not otherwise make.

Rather, they are corrupting in more subtle and important ways. While most officials recognize and reject bribes, they can easily succumb to and tolerate other forms of corruption without even thinking of it as such.

The first is special friendship, which is a much more powerful corrupter than money. When you become an elected official or staff member, you find that many lobbyists want to be your friend. Gifts and pleasant time spent together are ways of making special friends. Lobbyists very likely don’t even want anything specific at the time. They just want to be your friend, so that when needed, they can call on that friendship to help sway your decision. The average citizen doesn’t have that advantage.

The second is the “legislative lifestyle.” Officials and staffs who live high on the hog simply because they are in public life tend to get out of touch with life as average citizens. Their way of looking at things becomes shaped by their own privileged experiences, not by the real world.

That, too, is corrupting, because hanging onto that “lifestyle” by staying in office — whatever it takes — becomes paramount. In a republic, they should live like the rest of us, including paying for things with money they have earned.

Some officials say that disclosure alone is enough. We’re for disclosure, and we believe that it should be extended to officials’ families and their staff, who are not currently covered by the law.

But disclosure alone is not enough. If it were, even bribery itself should be legal, as long as it is disclosed. Some things should just plain be illegal.

Moreover, disclosure delayed can effectively be disclosure denied. We just saw an example of that, where the nearly $18,000 Thanksgiving trip for House Speaker David Ralston, R-Blue Ridge, wasn’t disclosed until after the election for the speaker.

Some officials also say that we should give the current laws a chance to work. But nobody makes that argument about, say, education. When have you heard someone say, “Last year we found some small ways to help education, and we should give them a chance to work before we try to find any new ways to help.” This is just a feeble excuse not to do anything about ethics this year.

Other officials say a cap would cause lobbyist to go underground. We shouldn’t make a law because people might break it? We don’t say that about laws limiting the speed of cars, or even murder. Sure, people will still speed, a few will still murder, but we don’t say, “Let’s not have a law because if we do, people will still break it.”

This shouldn’t be controversial. Other states, including Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee, severely limit lobbyist gifts. The people of Georgia don’t like lobbyist gifts, either, and it’s time to stop them.

William Perry is executive director of Common Cause Georgia.

Bob Irvin, a former GOP minority leader in the Georgia House, is its board chairman.

NO: Gift bans don’t address this issue: Why do groups need to lobby?

By Maury Litwack

President Barack Obama’s State of the Union included a challenge to Congress to publicly disclose when lawmakers are meeting with lobbyists.

Transparency and lobbying, regulation and lobbying, and limits on lobbying aren’t unique to Congress and are in fact increasingly bantered about as a cure to all which ails the issue of ethics and Georgia.

These formulaic fixes aren’t thoughtful. Regardless of the current or future rules imposed, the major “issues” of lobbying won’t be resolved by new legislative rules on elected officials or reporting requirements on those who wish to influence.

Georgia House Judiciary Chairman Wendell Willard has indicted his intent for more regulation of lobbying in an attempt to curb bad lobbying influence in Georgia.

Other groups have argued that more transparency and gift limits are the way to go by requiring increased lobbying disclosures.

These techniques will not curb the improper influence that many watchdog groups feel is exerted on legislators by lobbyists.

Many states have famously issued gift limits on legislators. Former Illinois Gov. George Ryan supported and signed into law sweeping ethics reform legislation during his tenure, including a $100 gift limit.

How did that turn out? Ryan now sits in a federal prison. Lest you think the ethics problems ended with that Republican governor we can look no further than the ethics problems of his successor, Democratic Gov. Rob Blagojevich.

Disclosure reports are a good act of transparency but aren’t perfect. The U.S. Government Accountability Office discovered that lobbyists err in making disclosures in different forms between 11 and 12 percent of the time.

Disclosures may serve as an “embarrassment factor,” which allows the media to highlight conflicts of interest, but it isn’t 100 percent effective against lobbying abuse.

What elected officials have to realize is that nothing will ever completely stop those who want to influence elected officials.

Yes, the question has to be raised about what can stop those few bad apples who wish to corrupt a system.

But those individuals will break the laws no matter what is imposed on the larger lobbying community.