“Setting The Bar For Sleazoid Antics”: Florida Legislature Approves Ethics Reform — No Joke!
Promise not to laugh?
An ethics bill was passed last week in Tallahassee.
It’s no joke. The Florida Legislature unanimously approved a law designed to clean up its own sketchy act, and that of elected officials all over the state.
Gov. Rick Scott says he’s “reviewing” the bill. To veto it would be an act of profound cluelessness, but remember who we’re talking about.
The ethics legislation is significant because the concept of enforcing ethical behavior is so foreign to Florida politics. Decades of well-publicized misdeeds and flagrant conflicts of interest have failed to make a moral dent.
A few years ago, lawmakers went through the motions of establishing something called a Commission on Ethics. Most Floridians were unaware of its existence, for good reason. It was a total sham.
The panel could place monetary fines on elected officials for ethical violations, but it wasn’t empowered to collect those fines, which on paper have surpassed $1 million over the last 10 years. Nobody had to pay, so nobody took the commission seriously.
This year things changed. Senate president Don Gaetz announced that ethics reform was a top priority. His bill flew through the Senate on the very first day of the Legislative session.
The House sent it back, after some tweaking by Speaker Will Weatherford, and the new version was adopted without a dissenting vote by the full Legislature.
If Scott signs the bill into law, the Commission on Ethics will actually be able to collect the fines it imposes on wayward officeholders — even garnish their wages, if necessary.
Among other provisions, lawmakers would be banned from voting on any bills that might enhance their own personal finances. While in office, they wouldn’t be allowed to accept any government job. Once out of office, they’d be prohibited from lobbying state agencies for two years.
Such restrictions seem rather basic, even tame, until you consider that we’re basically starting from scratch. In Florida, the bar for sleazoid antics has been set very high.
The impetus for reform isn’t mysterious. As Republicans, Gaetz and Weatherford have seen their party stained by scandals.
Gaetz is from Okaloosa County, home to former House Speaker Ray Sansom. In 2010 Sansom resigned from the Legislature because of ethics complaints and an ongoing corruption probe.
Just two months ago, former GOP chairman Jim Greer pleaded guilty to five felonies, including grand theft and money laundering, in a case involving extravagant misuse of campaign funds and the party’s American Express cards.
Greer’s plea avoided an embarrassing trial that would have sent top Republican politicians to the witness stand. Having dodged that bullet, party leaders then had to watch their lieutenant governor, Jennifer Carroll, abruptly resign after being linked to an Internet gambling cafe operation.
That company, Allied Veterans of the World, allegedly pocketed millions of dollars in charity funds that were supposed to be earmarked to help military veterans. It also donated gobs of money to the election campaigns of many Florida legislators, Republicans and Democrats.
Such headlines tend to produce a climate of fresh ethical awareness.
An interesting component of the new bill is the two-year ban on lobbying after leaving office. Traditionally, politicians who don’t want regular jobs become lobbyists when they return to private life.
House Speaker Weatherford’s predecessor, Dean Cannon, incorporated his own lobby firm a month before exiting the Legislature, and he hit the ground running. All perfectly legal, at the time.
Lots of other ex-House speakers and retired Senate bigshots are also lobbyists, schmoozing former colleagues on behalf of high-paying corporate and municipal clients. This revolving door ratifies the average voter’s cynical view of state government as a game fixed by insiders.
Although two years isn’t very long to wait between serving in public office and privately cashing in, any wait is better than what we’ve got now.
Ethics reform will be only as good as its enforcement, and history tells us not to have high hopes. This legislation is not without wiggle room and loopholes, including a provision for blind trusts that would allow officeholders to conceal the details of their wealth.
However, the bill at least puts some strong words on paper, and opens a pathway for prosecutors.
To help clarify the details and reduce the chances for future indictment, every elected official would be required to take annual ethics training.
You’re laughing again, right?
Sure, there’s something absurd about having to train a politician to be ethical. But, hey, if they can teach a cat to play the piano….
By: Carl Hiaason, The National Memo, April 30, 2013
“Bush v Gore”: Maybe The Supreme Court Should Have Said “Let Democracy Take Its Course”
Retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor hasn’t given much thought to which was the most important case she helped decide during her 25 years on the bench. But she has no doubt which was the most controversial.
It was Bush v. Gore, which ended the Florida recount and decided the 2000 presidential election.
Looking back, O’Connor said, she isn’t sure the high court should have taken the case.
“It took the case and decided it at a time when it was still a big election issue,” O’Connor said during a talk Friday with the Tribune editorial board. “Maybe the court should have said, ‘We’re not going to take it, goodbye.'”
In talking to the editorial board of the Chicago Tribune, the retired justice added that the case “gave the court a less-than-perfect reputation.”
You don’t say.
O’Connor went on to say Florida election officials “hadn’t done a real good job there” — she seems to have quite an appreciation for understatements — but the high court “probably … added to the problem at the end of the day.”
Had the Supreme Court not intervened, the 2000 recount process in Florida almost certainly would have continued. If all the state’s ballots had been properly counted, then-Vice President Al Gore “would have won, by a very narrow margin,” according to an independent newspaper consortium that examined all of the ballots.
O’Connor, in other words, was one of five justices who directly dictated the outcome of a national presidential election, helping elect the candidate who came in second.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, April 29, 2013
“Is Anyone Surprised?”: Marco Rubio Pushes For Gun Loophole That Would Weaken Background Checks
Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) backed the NRA-supported “concealed carry reciprocity” Sunday morning, an initiative which would require concealed carry permits to be accepted universally across the country, forcing states with tighter permit restrictions to accept permit-holders from states with looser ones.
Rubio took the initiative one step further, saying on Fox News Sunday that if a person has undergone a background check for a concealed carry permit in one state, that person shouldn’t necessarily have to undergo another background check to buy a gun in another state.
RUBIO: If you have a concealed weapons permit, you do a background check. I have no problem with that. But are they going to honor that in all 50 states? If someone goes to another state to buy a gun do I have to undergo another background check, or will my concealed weapons permit be de facto proof that I am not a criminal? These are the sorts of things I hope we’ll talk about.
Rubio’s comments ignore that the requirements for concealed carry permits vary from state to state, and that a person can commit a criminal act after they have received a concealed carry permit. Plus, permit issuers don’t always catch criminals or the mentally unstable — a 2012 investigation that found Rubio’s home state of Florida did not check the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System when issuing concealed carry permits, overlooking the 1.6 million records of Americans with mental illnesses the database contains.
The Senator on Sunday also admitted that though he hadn’t read the Manchin-Toomey gun bill, which will expand background checks to include most gun sales, in its entirety, he was skeptical of it because it would impede on the rights of law-abiding gun owners and would “do nothing to keep criminals from buying” guns. He said focusing on gun control wasn’t the way to prevent future shootings like the one in Newtown — instead, he said the country needed to focus on addressing violence and mental health issues in general, citing the decline of the American family as a reason for increased gun violence in the country.
Rubio’s comments are in line with the NRA’s position on gun control legislation: in a letter to the Senate, NRA Institute for Legislative Action Executive Director Chris Cox said Congress needed to “fix our broken mental health system” rather than “infringe upon the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding gun owners.” NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre has also made comments similar to Rubio’s, recently claiming Connecticut’s new gun laws have only made “the lawbooks bigger for the law-abiding people.” But Rubio’s statements aren’t surprising: in March, he joined a group of Republicans that threatened to block gun control legislation in the Senate.
By: Katie Valentine, Think Progress, April 14, 2013
“Inside The Anti-Obamacare Resistance”: A Facinating Glimpse Into Warped Conservative Ideology And Tactics
The two largest states that have so far failed to join in the Medicaid expansion provided for in the Affordable Care Act are Florida and Texas, where Republicans control the legislature and the governor’s office. Looking more closely at the intra-Republican battle over how and whether rich new federal funds can be captured without “surrendering” to the hated Obama provides a fascinating glimpse into conservative ideology and tactics.
Florida offers the murkiest situation. Gov. Rick Scott, who was beginning to look rather toasty in his 2014 re-election prospects, roiled conservative circles in his own state and nationally by suddenly coming out for Medicaid expansion in exchange for permission from the Obama administration to move Medicaid beneficiaries into private managed care plans. But Scott’s been stopped cold by GOP legislators, who in turn seem split between outright rejectionists centered in the state House and those in the Senate who want an even better “deal” that would utilize the state’s CHiP program, which is a privatized premium support scheme, instead of Medicaid for the expansion.
A conservative Florida reporter presents the views of the rejectionist camp quite vividly:
Tom Lauder, a reporter for Media Trackers Florida, which is closely following the Florida Obamacaid debate, says House Republicans appear likely to stand firm….
“Grassroots conservatives are particularly upset with Gov. Scott using the language of the left in his efforts to build momentum for Obamacaid,” Lauder explained. “When Scott argues, ‘I cannot, in good conscience, deny the uninsured access to care,’ he asserts that the only time people have access to goods and services is when government gives it to them as an entitlement. Scott has enraged his conservative base by making this big-government argument. This isn’t a question of whether government should give Medicaid to the poor and disabled, because the poor and disabled already qualify for Medicaid.”
At issue, Lauder says, is the rejection of Scott’s argument that federal funding will come without cost to state taxpayers.
“Scott’s conservative base also resents Scott talking about federal funding as if it were free money,” Lauder added. “Even if the federal government kept its promise to fund most of the Florida Medicaid expansion, which many conservatives doubt will be the case, Floridians pay federal taxes in addition to state taxes. Federal dollars flowing into Florida are not free dollars, even for Floridians.
In other words: Florida’s “true conservatives” don’t much care what mechanism is being used to expand coverage; they’re just flatly against it.
In Texas, meanwhile, the rejectionist camp is led by Gov. Rick Perry, as Ron Brownstein explains in a National Journal column:
Republican state Rep. John Zerwas, a health care leader who represents a district outside Houston, says legislators are getting an earful at home from providers and local officials worried about the state rejecting the money.
Against that backdrop, Zerwas and some GOP state House colleagues are searching for ways to steer Texas into the expansion. They assume the state will not move more people into the existing Medicaid program. But they consider it misguided to simply reject the federal money and deny insurance coverage to so many people who could obtain it. “We are not going to make this better … without doing something that substantially reforms how we deliver Medicaid,” Zerwas says. However, “we have to have a solution for this group of people.”
Last week, Zerwas introduced legislation that would authorize state health officials to negotiate with the Obama administration to expand while delivering coverage for the newly eligible through new means. He likes the deal the administration is discussing with Arkansas, which could allow the state to use Medicaid expansion dollars to instead buy private insurance for its eligible adults, and he believes that approach could be “sellable to the governor.”
Many here, though, wonder if Perry would take any deal. The widespread belief is that he intends to seek the GOP presidential nomination again in 2016, and accepting more Medicaid money would smudge his image of Alamo-like resistance to Obama.
This is an interesting scenario given recent efforts from the Perry camp (outlined earlier this week in another National Journal piece by Michael Catalini) to depict the swaggering, gaffe-prone Texan as “ahead of his time” in understanding the need for Republican outreach to Latinos. Notes Brownstein:
[I]f state Republicans reject federal money that could insure 1 million or more Hispanics, they could provide Democrats with an unprecedented opportunity to energize those voters—the key to the party’s long-term revival. With rejection, says Democratic state Rep. Rafael Anchia of Dallas, Republicans “would dig themselves into an even deeper hole with the Hispanic community.”
It’s unclear how this will all play out in Florida and Texas. But nobody recently has lost any money betting on the hard-core conservative approach, particularly on an issue as incendiary to the Right as Obamacare. That rejecting any sort of coverage expansion beyond that absolutely required by the ACA would mean leaving vast sums of federal money on the table would in fact be considered a badge of honor by a lot of the people involved.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, March 22, 2013
“Live By The Teaparty, Die By The Teaparty”: Florida Governor Rick Scott Is In Deep Trouble
According to a new Public Policy Polling poll, Florida voters are eager to vote Governor Rick Scott out of office.
The poll finds Scott’s approval rating at a dismal 33 percent, with 57 percent disapproving. These numbers are unchanged from PPP’s previous Florida poll in January, despite Scott’s concerted effort to appeal to Florida’s moderates over the past two months.
If the election were held today, former governor Charlie Crist would easily defeat Scott, 52 to 40 percent. Crist, the Republican-turned-Democrat who served as governor from 2007 through 2011, holds a 46 percent approval rating, with 43 percent of Floridians disapproving. These numbers aren’t great, but should be good enough to top the deeply unpopular Scott.
The poll also finds Scott trailing two other potential Democratic candidates; former Tampa mayor Pam Iorio leads Scott 44 to 37 percent, and former Florida chief financial officer Alex Sink — who Scott defeated by less than 1 percent in the 2010 gubernatorial election — would lead the incumbent 45 to 40 percent.
Perhaps more troubling for Scott is that he is no longer even a safe bet to win the Republican Party’s nomination next year — 42 percent of Republicans say they want Scott to be their candidate in 2014, while 43 percent say they would prefer someone else. An overwhelming 55 percent of self-described moderates want to replace Scott; just 34 want him to seek re-election. “Somewhat conservative” Republicans support Scott 43 to 38 percent, and “very conservative” Republicans back him 46 to 42 percent. These numbers would theoretically leave the governor very vulnerable to a primary challenge.
Scott’s struggles among moderate Republicans help to explain his recent shift towards the center; after spending most of his term railing against government spending and Obamacare, in the past two months Scott moved to expand funding for education and accepted the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion. So far, these decisions have not helped Scott’s poll numbers.
They may have consequences with Scott’s few remaining supporters, however. Scott’s flip-flop on Medicaid expansion left one Florida Tea Party group so angry that it penned the governor a “breakup note,” wondering “how the Medicaid expansion is going to pay for the surgery to remove the knife planted in my back.”
If Scott isn’t careful, one of the first governors to be swept into office by the Tea Party movement may end up being swept out by the exact same forces.
By: Henry Decker, The National Memo, March 20, 2013
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