Both parties have helped maintain a system in which the use of public office for personal gain is not only widely condoned but facilitated by lax laws and cynical practices.
The fact is the greater blame for the ongoing mess has to lie with the Democrats. They have controlled both the Legislature and the governor's office for nearly five years. They have the numbers to enact whatever laws they want. Prominent Democrats like Wayne Bryant and Sharpe James are among the most brazen exploiters of their elected positions.
Many Speak Of Ethics, Few Act
~ Monday, October 16, 2006
Democrats and Republicans blame each other for the sad state of governmental ethics in New Jersey. Why, it's enough to make one question the sincerity of politicians.
The fact is that both parties have helped maintain a system in which the use of public office for personal gain is not only widely condoned but facilitated by lax laws and cynical practices.
Since everyone seems to agree that it needs fixing, why not just get together and fix it?
Clearly, a lot of people find ethics more attractive as a partisan talking point than a policy in place.
The greater blame for the ongoing mess has to lie with the Democrats. They have controlled both the Legislature and the governor's office for nearly five years. They have the numbers to enact whatever laws they want. Prominent Democrats like Wayne Bryant and Sharpe James are among the most brazen exploiters of their elected positions.
Although the party has taken partial steps toward ethics reform, there's a lot left to be done and not much has happened lately. Officeholders still have ample opportunity to benefit themselves in ways short of outright theft, bribery and extortion, which have the disadvantage of being illegal.
Meanwhile, the Republicans -- who did virtually nothing to clean up government during their long reign at the State House in the 1990s -- have embraced the cause with born-again fervor.
Last month, the Assembly GOP unveiled an 11-point package of ethics bills and called for a special pre-election session of the Legislature to act on it. Given that the Legislature already is in the middle of a special session on tax reform, the demand for instant attention was wholly off the wall.
Moreover, the Republicans made their partisan interests obvious by hanging their program on "recent scandals" involving Democrats and by expanding that corral to include Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J. Menendez is in a bitter race with Republican Tom Kean Jr., who has staked his campaign on painting the senator as corrupt and repeatedly describes him as "under criminal investigation," even though no law-enforcement agency has said so.
Assemblywoman Bonnie Watson Coleman, D-Ewing, the Assembly majority leader, responded to the Republicans' move in the same partisan spirit. She dismissed their package as "a warmed-over stew of existing legislative measures that were cobbled together for politically exploitative purposes six weeks before Election Day."
And she boasted that Democrats, after they took over the Legislature, "enacted the most sweeping array of ethics, campaign finance and lobbying reforms that the state had seen in three decades."
Maybe so -- although the bar had been set pretty low. Nevertheless, the "warmed-over stew" Watson Coleman disparaged contains plenty of the kind of nourishment ethics-starved New Jersey requires.
The GOP would extend the existing ban on pay-to-play to all levels of government. Present law forbids the granting of state contracts to businesses that contribute to state parties and officeholders, but doesn't cover the counties and municipalities. These are the trenches where pay-to-play flourishes, stifling legitimate competition and inflating the cost of public services.
The Republicans also would end the laundering of campaign contributions by "wheeling" funds between party committees in different counties. They would bar dual officeholding, stop the giving of late-career pay hikes in order to pad public pensions, close loopholes in the anti-nepotism laws and make convicted public officials serve jail time and forfeit their pensions. If proposals like these are warmed over, it's because the Legislature allowed them to linger too long in the refrigerator.
Both parties have members who are dedicated to reform. When they put aside party loyalties to work together, good things can happen. They teamed up in a rare bipartisan maneuver early this year to preserve, over the resistance of the Senate's Democratic majority, the right of town councils and citizens to enact their own tough pay-to-play laws. It was encouraging that Assembly Speaker Joe Roberts last month appointed an equal number of Republicans and Democrats to a task force to draft a bill improving the Clean Elections pilot program.
Bonnie Watson Coleman says her party has "gotten the message" that the public is fed up with corruption and the squandering of tax dollars. "More will be done" to fix the system, she vows. That promise could come true if both parties would forget about scoring partisan points and focus on legislating in the public interest.
Contact George Amick at gamick@njtimes.com.
© 2006 The Times
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