DR News: Veon’s Parting Shot

by Tim Potts, Co-founder of Democracy Rising PA

In this Edition:

• Reality Check
• Veon’s Parting Shot
• The Email Exclusion

Reality Check

859 - Days since the Pay Raise of 2005. See the ticker .
1 – Law enacted to improve government integrity. See the cartoon .
0 – “Best-in-America” laws enacted. See the campaign .
See the full November edition of “Reality Check” on the web.

Veon’s Parting Shot

He was the only lawmaker who refused to repeal the Pay Raise of 2005, thumbing his nose at public anger. Last year, his constituents thumbed back, voting former Rep. Mike Veon, D-Beaver, out of office after 22 years in the House, including six years as the Democrats’ policy chairman and another eight years as whip.

These leadership positions gave Veon access to a lot of OPM (Other People’s Money), which he spent with abandon on his way out the door. On November 11, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’sTracie Mauriello documented nearly $80,000 in bonuses Veon paid to staffers after his defeat. The bonuses include:

• $5,000 to a staffer who had worked for Veon for only three months.
• $20,380 to a staffer whose name does not appear on the list of House staff provided by the Chief Clerk’s office.
• $10,065 to a staffer who took a three-month leave-of-absence to work for the House Democratic Campaign Committee.

Attorney General Tom Corbett is investigating these bonuses as part of a larger probe into $3.6 million paid as bonuses to legislative staff last year. Click here for the full Post-Gazette story.

See the excuse lawmakers give for keeping huge surpluses, and learn how to talk back with the facts. No Excuse!

The Email Exclusion

As reported by news outlets everywhere, the failure of House Bill 443 to include email is unprecedented in the U.S. So there has been a great deal of speculation about why House members are so eager to keep emails secret. Under the current version of HB 443, only those parts of emails that “contain a detailed discussion of the spending of public money” are public records.

One theory for lawmakers’ insistence on secrecy is that email gives lobbyists access to lawmakers at the instant they are voting on legislation. In previous eras of corruption, PA was notorious for the influence lobbyists had over lawmakers. The leading industries of the Gilded Age were given seats on the floor of the House so that they could conveniently tell lawmakers how to vote. Eventually, lobbyists were banned from the floor of the General Assembly and relegated to the lobby outside the ornate House and Senate chambers.

Until email. Now, email puts lobbyists back on the floor of the House and Senate, but in a way that neither citizens nor reporters can see.

From a citizen perspective, the beauty of email is that it can allow enterprising citizens and reporters to connect the dots. Votes on legislation are time-stamped. So are emails. It wouldn’t take much to compare email records and voting records to see whether lawmakers were taking or rejecting last-minute directions from lobbyists.

The desire to protect the relationships between lobbyists and lawmakers also explains why HB 443 is at pains to say that only “detailed … spending” information is worthy of citizen and media inspection. This excludes general spending information that lobbyists and lawmakers may exchange and that may or may not be accurate.

It’s not enough to know how much a lawmaker’s decision will cost. Citizens deserve the ability to verify independently why their lawmakers are voting for or against taxes and regulations, and that requires having independent access to the documents that try to persuade lawmakers one way or another.

Questions:

• How “detailed” does a discussion of public spending have to be before it becomes public information?
• How is anyone to know that an email contains a “detailed discussion of the spending of public money” in order to ask for it?
• How many lawyers and how many years will it take to answer these two simple questions that citizens in other states don’t even have to ask when checking in on their government?
• Or is the real problem with email garden-variety venality – the desire to protect against disclosure of who’s doing what with whom at whose un-detailed expense? Remember former Congressman Mark Foley , R-FL? Who thinks it can’t happen here?

It’s easy to conclude that keeping email secret is not designed to protect the innocent; it’s designed to protect the guilty. Other states have figured out how to protect the innocent without protecting the guilty. PA lawmakers should follow their lead and do them one better.

See the excuses lawmakers give for supporting a lousy open records proposal, and learn how to talk back with the facts. No Excuse!

• Democracy Rising Pennsylvania P.O. Box 618, Carlisle, PA 17013

Tagged: Attorney General Tom Corbett, Beaver County, Citizens, email, guilty, lawmakers, lobbyists, Mark Foley, Mike Veon, open records, OPM, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Tracie Mauriello