Archive for: October 13, 2006

Well I sure hope so. The lieutenant governor candidate works for Bradley, Arant, Rose and White, an Alabama law firm with many clients, including state government.

“I’ll sever all ties with Bradley Arant,” Strange said. “I don’t want anyone to ever be in a position to raise an issue that I was somehow benefiting, or my firm was, from my public service.”

Does “sever all ties” include golfing? Strange’s biggest weakness is that he is seen as a bought candidate. His job at the law firm includes lobbying Congress in Washington on behalf of the firm’s clients. His Democratic opponent, Jim Folsom, works as an investment banker at the office of Raymond James and Associates. He says he intends to keep his job there if elected. The lieutenant governor pays a mere $48,000 a year. Both of these guys make hundreds of thousands at their current jobs.

Yesterday, Strange announced his nine-point plan to boost accountability in the legislature and increase public confidence in government. I added a few details below that were left out of the press release:

1. Mostly Ban PAC-to-PAC transfers. He wants to allow a single PAC-to-PAC transfer during a campaign season.
2. Require daily campaign finance reports to be filed from 45 days out to the election.
3. Require unopposed candidates to file campaign disclosure reports in primary and general elections. They currently only have to file reports for the general election.
4. Require lobbyists to report any amount over $0.10 they spend on a legislator (it says every dime).
5. Require legislators to track and report any amount over $0.10 spent on them by lobbyists.
6. Ban pass-through pork, which is when a lawmaker appropriates money to an agency with the understanding that the lawmaker gets to direct that money to projects without the governor’s approval.
7. End double-dipping by lawmakers and their families, which is when a lawmaker holds another state government job. I think this is already illegal for the lawmaker, but it’s not enforced. I’m not sure if it’s kosher to ban even family members, though. What if your spouse is a teacher? Can you not then run for office?
8. End legislative immunity from speeding tickets. Yeah, they currently have it.
9. Make the state House and Senate proceedings more available to the public. I say give us an internet stream.

Not so bad, all in all.

I haven’t really been following this two-year college scandal, but apparently several legislators and/or their families have been holding positions and receiving pay in the state’s two-year college system. The idea is that the number is so high that it can’t be kosher. I think this is what you get when you have a part-time legislature who isn’t paid enough to concentrate on it full time. The big papers today sent out a barrage of editorials about the subject:

• The Birmingham News is calling for full disclosure on how the legislators got these jobs.
• The Press-Register is calling for action to prevent legislators from holding jobs in public education.
• The Huntsville Times joins the Press-Register in calling for the end of the legislators from holding public education jobs

My guess is that some of the smaller papers sent out similar editorials today and yesterday. If you point them out in comments, I’ll add them to the list.

Community service grants may be pork, but they are legal pork according to the Alabama Supreme Court. In a unanimous 9-0 ruling, the court said Troy King and Bob Riley did not prove their case.

The court said laws passed by the Legislature are presumed to be constitutional, and that attorneys for Gov. Bob Riley and Attorney General Troy King gave them no substantive reason to think this one wasn’t.

The grants are money that the legislature appropriates for each legislative district for the individual legislators to spend on schools and other projects in their district. They were ruled unconstitutional last year because the court said public money must be appropriated by the legislature but must be spent by the executive branch.

In response, the legislature this year created an executive committee of elected executive branch heads to approve all of the spending. The committee consisted of the lieutenant governor, the state treasurer, the agriculture commissioner, and the state school superintendent. The Democrat-controlled legislature purposely excluded the Republican governor from the committee, and that was the basis for the lawsuit trying to end the program. The legislature contended that, even though the governor is the head of the executive branch, other executive heads, including the secretary of state and the treasurer, are entrusted with public money as a regular practice.

The Mobile Bay Times has a great article on the recent Press-Register polls of Alabama candidates. The poll confirmed the idea that the governor’s race is over but several down-ballot races are extremely comptetitive.

Were the numbers in any way surprising? We called on several politically-attuned contacts for their interpretations of the data.

They then get a quick analysis from several anonymous insiders from the Mobile area. It’s a very diverse set of people, but I think they’ve convinced me that Folsom is going to win lieutenant governor. It’s starting to look like both parties are going to net gain zero seats this election in state-wide, non-judicial races.