Thursday, June 29, 2006
Lobbyist disclosure pits Perzel against Jubelirer
It may look like a simple case of one-upmanship, but I'd like to think the Pennsylvania Senate's state government committee was making a statement this week when it unanimously voted to gut a lobbyist disclosure bill the House passed overwhelmingly just last week.If I'm reading between the lines right, that statement was to House Speaker John Perzel and the message was, "You can fool some state legislators some of the time..."
After all, the House bill that passed 190-1 was actually a watered down version of Perzel's own bill, House Bill 2753, cloaked in a competing lobbyist reform bill.
The House approved House Bill 700 once in March 2005. But Perzel refused to call for a second vote on that measure, saying he could write a better bill - but only if he could write it behind closed doors.
Perzel, who took more than $34,000 in gifts and trips from lobbyists last year, and his unnamed "research staff" started work in February.
H.B. 700 emerged from the House Appropriations Committee on June 13 - the same day Perzel finally introduced H.B. 2753 - and a full week after he held a press conference to announce the long-awaited lobbyist disclosure measure.
Perzel's bill still isn't listed among the competing lobbyists disclosure bills on the "Bill Topic Index" of the Legislature's Web site.
In reality, H.B. 700 was gutted by the committee and its wording was replaced with the bulk of Perzel's H.B. 2753.
However, a controversial portion that would have made violations of Perzel's bill possibly subject to racketeering charges was dropped from H.B. 700. Also stripped was a clause that Perzel wanted to bar each lobbyist from representing different principals if their interests conflict.
When it went to a second and third floor vote last Thursday, H.B. 700's author, state Rep. John Maher, R-Allegheny County, pretended like it was still the bill he wrote.
And since the state representatives had already approved the measure once, I suspect many didn't read the revised bill and voted for it, rather than Perzel's bill, unaware that the wording in both lengthy bills was now virtually identical.
The wording of H.B. 700 was sprung on House members two hours before the vote and Perzel repeatedly cut off the microphone of its lone dissenter, state Rep. Greg Vitali, who has long been a proponent of meaningful lobbyist reform.
So it seems only fitting that the Senate's committee unanimously voted Wednesday to replace Perzel's wording in the House bill with the text of S.B. 1, which the Senate passed in April 2005 but Perzel refused to pass.
That bill was written by Senate President Pro Tempore Bob Jubelirer, who now has nothing to lose since being ousted in the May primary.
Here's the real difference: Jubelirer's S.B. 1 allows a lobbyist to give a legislator up to $650 a year in hospitality before requiring the lobbyist to publically name the lawmaker.
Perzel's version of H.B. 700 would set the bar for reporting at $650 per occurrence - so travel, gifts and dinners that total less than that would not require disclosure.
As lawmakers await a meeting of the minds between these two Republicans, Pennsylvania remains the only state in the nation without a lobbyist disclosure law.
Meanwhile, 800 registered lobbyists spent nearly $125 million last year to sway the opinion of our 253 elected lawmakers as well as high-ranking officials in Gov. Ed Rendell's administration, according to statistics the lobbyists filed with the Secretary of the Senate.
The statistics are strictly voluntary, and do not list which legislators accepted gifts, trips or dinners from lobbyists or say what specific legislation they wanted passed in return.
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The Daily Rant by Dave Ralis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
The Daily Rant by Dave Ralis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
