DURING this year’s session of the Georgia General Assembly, state lawmakers were treated to almost $1 million in freebies — from expensive meals to sports, concert and theater tickets to boxes of chocolate to alcohol in hospitality suites — by lobbyists for a host of interests, including utility companies, a hospital, an insurance companies and trade associations.
According to a story in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, lawmakers received gifts valued at $931,000 from lobbyists during this year’s legislative session. Although the money doesn’t rain down equally on state lawmakers — after all, in a Republican-dominated legislature, there’s not much incentive for lobbyists to treat the average Democrat to anything much more than a Varsity hot dog and maybe some onion rings — it’s nonetheless interesting to do the math on the average per-legislator expenditure by lobbyists.
Taking the $931,000 figure from the Journal-Constitution story and dividing it by 236 — the number of legislators in the Georgia General Assembly — shows a per-legislator tally of $3,944 in lobbying gifts. Divide that by the roughly 65 days that legislators were in Atlanta for this year’s session, and you come up with a lobbyist-paid per diem benefit for legislators of $60.69.
AS TROUBLING as the monetary aspects of lobbying as revealed in the Atlanta newspaper’s report are, the reaction of one of the state’s leading lawmakers, also appearing in the Journal-Constitution report, are no less stunning.
Glenn Richardson, R-Hiram, speaker of the House of Representatives in the GOP-dominated state legislature, is quoted as saying, “One of the things that amazes me is people’s criticism of us going to dinner or entertaining — as if that was something wrong. Having wine and dinner is what business is made of.”
Beyond the arrogance evident in the speaker’s suggestion that this state’s taxpayers shouldn’t dare question the motives of state lawmakers who take advantage of lobbyists’ largesse is the conceit that what legislators do is in any way akin to “business.”
Business, Mr. Speaker, is a mostly honorable enterprise in which an employer and an employee enter into a mutually beneficial exchange of services for money.
What you and your colleagues do when you sit down with lobbyists, Rep. Richardson, is to sneakily exchange your legislative influence for personal gain without regard for your employers — the people who put you in office with the expectation that you’d look out for their interests, and who pay you what is, quite frankly, a handsome wage for a part-time job — $17,341 per year, plus a $7,000 expense account, plus a $173 daily stipend when you are doing state business.
MR. SPEAKER, you can call your dealings with lobbyists a “shakedown,” or you can call their dealings with you “bribery.” But you can’t call that relationship “business” — unless you’re willing to put the word “funny” in front of it.
The depth of the speaker’s delusion with regard to lobbying was further on display in the Journal-Constitution story when he averred that “(p)eople want time with me.” Sorry, Mr. Speaker, but lobbyists don’t “want” time with you. They “need” time with you, to determine exactly what it will cost them to have you abandon the public’s interests in favor of their interests.
The fact that you and a number of your colleagues don’t recognize that distinction raises real questions about your ability to make decisions that are in the best interests of the people of Georgia.
|
No Related links found
|
