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May 9, 2008
Lawmakers Loathing Makes Lawn Signs Linger, Languish
Friday May 9, 2008
In the rubble of the recently departed legislative session, amid the posturing and preening, the arguing and subterfuge, the boulevard of broken laws, uncalled amendments and the cynical dismality of "technical" changes to state law, is an example of self-destruction.
Scroll through recent Blog-o-ramas to the last "lawn signs" posting to get the back story.
Be that as it may, the bill Rep. Chris Caruso attempted to amend, which would have allowed incumbent lawmakers to skate on 30 percent of the value of their lawn sign stock, died when the General Assembly finished work at midnight, or 12:04 in the Senate, or even later in the House, which didn't go "sine die" (pronounced SIN-ay DEE-ay) until House Majority Leader Chris Donovan got around to it at 12:14 a.m. on Thursday.
House members had openly groused about having to bill themselves for lawn signs they've already had, so Donovan "PTed" (passed temporarily) the bill into oblivion.
Since they lashed out at Caruso, the chairman of the ethics-minded Government Administration & Elections Committee, and disposed of the bill (out of sight, out of mind) in the last few days of the waning Legislature, it has now come back to bite them.
Because without a change in the new public-financing law, no matter how old the incumbents' lawn signs are, they'll have to subtract the FULL VALUE from their taxpayer-finance Citizens Elections Funds grants this summer. And if there's anything incumbents don't want to give up, is an edge on their opponents, particularly in the scared New World of public financing.
Yep, taxpayer-paid "information" mailers from the Capitol isn't enough, they want to keep their lawnsigns for free, too. So it's a true, if rare example, of the House's dissing of Caruso costing them serious coin, unless a crazy fix can be done in the upcoming special session. Maybe that's another way to kill ethics reform, if that gets tacked on to the special session too.
Posted by Ken on May 9, 2008 6:58 PM
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Comments
The rules are actually quite clear that you have to destroy or sell anything of value at the end of a campaign, so a legislator who's preserved their signs has already, technically speaking, broken the rules.
Posted by: mattw at May 9, 2008 11:04 PM
How many hours were spent on this with zero benifit to the people they represent? The time should be deducted from their pay.
Posted by: Bob at May 11, 2008 1:48 PM
