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Shine a light on Legislature

Published 10:32 am Tuesday, June 15, 2010

If it’s true, as state Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown opined, that the Legislature now does its business more transparently than it used to, then we offer a corollary:

When it comes to keeping secrets, lawmakers of the past had nothing on the CIA.

The closing days of this year’s session in Olympia, which is when Brown made her rather amazing statement, were closer to an exercise in covert deal-making than of an open public process.

Some examples, included in a recent policy note from the Washington Policy Center, a free-market think tank:

  • Public hearings were held on bills that contained no text, only a title. Yet lobbyists for state government agencies were prepared to testify about details the public had never seen.

  • Hearings were scheduled hastily, without the adequate public notice (five days’ worth) legislative rules specify. One such hearing was on Brown’s proposal to create a state income tax — hardly a routine topic. The Senate Ways and Means Committee announced one morning that it would hold a hearing on the bill that afternoon.

  • Votes were taken on bills the same day they were made available for public review. In the rush to get them ready, drafting errors were made that led to several “corrective” vetoes by the governor.

    There are good reasons legislative rules call for a deliberative process, one that includes meaningful public input. Not the least of them is maintaining the public’s trust, a commodity that’s in short supply these days.

    To facilitate a fair and open discussion, information about bills must be widely and easily available, and notice of hearings must be adequate to allow for public participation. When such rules are waived or otherwise ignored, you can bet someone’s proposing something they think won’t go down well.

    Representative democracy can’t run effectively that way. Legislators are elected to represent the citizenry at large, not just government insiders and special-interest lobbyists.

    Jason Mercier, director of the WPC’s Center for Government Reform, tracked the Legislature’s various abuses of openness as closely as any non-legislator could, and has drafted some simple, sensible changes to keep them from happening in the future. They’re in the form of amendments to the state Constitution, in order to force lawmakers to follow them.

  • Give the public 72 hours notice of any public hearing on a bill.

  • Prohibit title-only bills — in other words, require that a proposal actually exist before it gets a hearing or a vote.

  • No votes on passage of a bill’s final version until the public has had at least 24 hours to review it.

    For the sake of the Legislature’s credibility, this year’s candidates should vow to support such amendments, so the public can vote on them next year. Voters deserve to know whether candidates really believe in the public’s right to know.

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