In his Jan. 29 State of the State speech, Gov. J.B. Pritzker called for “real, lasting ethics reform.”
Good.
But not good enough. Not for the moment we’re in.
Tightening the codes of conduct for elected officials and public employees is a tepid and familiar goal, one that lacks the ambition needed to battle the entrenched culture of corruption. What Pritzker needs to do is take off his shoe, pound it on the table and vow to lead an effort to make Illinois’ ethics laws the strictest in the nation:
Make us “a model for other states,” as Better Government Association policy director Marie Dillon put it in testimony last week in Springfield. That would be quite a step up from the current laughingstock/cautionary example.
Dillon, a friend and former colleague, was among the advocates who made presentations to the General Assembly’s Joint Commission on Ethics and Lobbying Reform. The bipartisan panel was formed last year in response to the metastasizing federal probe into state and municipal lawmakers and is conducting a series of hearings before issuing a final set of recommendations to the legislature by the end of March.
Joint commissions are cool and all, but they lack a certain urgency. If China can build a 1,000-bed hospital in 10 days, surely, with insistent leadership from the top, the state of Illinois can cobble together the toughest ethics rules in the country in less than 10 weeks.
Pritzker says the right things. The nearly 300 words he devoted to ethics in his speech made most of the next-day news stories.
“We must root out the purveyors of greed and corruption — in both parties — whose presence infects the bloodstream of government,” he said. “It’s no longer enough to sit idle while under-the-table deals, extortion or bribery persist.”
The governor went on to call for an end to “the practice of legislators serving as paid lobbyists” and of legislators immediately becoming lobbyists after leaving office. He underscored the need for enhanced conflict-of-interest disclosures and for the imposition of penalties on those who cast votes in their own interests.
We’ve heard similar rhetoric before, and we’ve seen associated proposals die quiet deaths in committees. What we haven’t seen is strident leadership that demands change, not just in occasional speeches or censorious news releases following yet another indictment, but every day. What we haven’t seen is a governor use his political capital and moral authority to hammer away on ethics. What we haven’t seen is a governor willing to take personal ownership of the issue and not fob it off on a commission.
We’ll never eliminate political corruption. The scoundrels never quit trying to line their pockets, even as their colleagues are caught and marched off to prison. But we can make life more difficult for them.
“There isn’t one state we can point to right now as the best,” said Alisa Kaplan, policy director at Reform for Illinois (formerly the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform), who also testified before the commission last week. “We’d need to pick and choose from the tightest provisions around the country.”
We could for instance, borrow a page from a new law in Florida that will require former lawmakers to wait six years after leaving office to begin working as lobbyists. We could copy the exhaustive financial disclosure requirements in New York and California. We should at least do as well as the 35 states that require legislators to recuse themselves from voting on bills where they have a conflict of interest (Illinois’ current, flaccid Governmental Ethics Act merely suggests that a conflicted lawmaker “should consider the possibility of abstaining.”)
In an interview, Dillon said best-in-the-nation ethics laws would include stricter campaign finance laws, more expansive Freedom of Information Act and open-meetings act procedures and tightened procurement regulations. In testimony to the commission, Common Cause Illinois Executive Director Georgia Logothetis suggested “real teeth for enforcement” against violators.
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In the end, though, advocates and commissioners can only advise on overhauling our ethics laws. It’s up to the governor to take the lead in demanding that they be the best.
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