A legislative combo platter

— Offering to behave ethically on some sort of conditional basis is not ethical at all. But it qualifies as improvement in the Arkansas Legislature.

John Brummett is blogging daily online.

At least ethical behavior has progressed to the point of being a legitimate matter of negotiation.

There seems to be this percolating deal at the state Capitol: If voters would permit state legislators to serve more terms and then provide for them an easier process to get their pay raised, then they, in turn, would agree to abide by certain prescribed ethical guidelines.

Implicit, of course, is the inverse: If we won’t, then they won’t.

What ought to be three separate issues-ethical behavior, legislator pay and term limits-began an apparent consolidation last week.

Legislators confronted the deadline for filing joint resolutions proposing amendments to the state Constitution. The Legislature may choose three of those to refer to the voters at the general election in 2014.

As usual, legislators got in under the deadline with “shell” measures, meaning resolutions containing titles and general descriptions, but not, as yet, details. Those will come later, via amendments.

The Legislature won’t get around to voting out the referrals until the last few days of the session.

One of the shells, by Rep. Warwick Sabin of Little Rock and Sen. Jon Woods of Springdale, is an outline reserving a later opportunity to fill in these details:

1.) Bans on lobbyists’ gifts to legislators and on direct corporate and union contributions to state campaigns, and on legislators’ ability to become lobbyists for two years after leaving the Legislature.

All of that was contained in a citizens’ initiative proposed last year by a group called Regnat Populus that failed in a late frenzy to collect enough signatures to get the measure on the ballot. Regnat Populus promises to bring it back in two years unless the Legislature acts.

2.) Creation of an independent citizens’ commission that could grant annual pay raises for legislators and other constitutional officers.

3.) An as-yet unspecified relaxing of term limits so that House members could serve more than three terms, and senators more than two terms.

Apparently, the idea is to allow 16 years of service in total, all in one chamber or split between the two. You conceivably could get 16 years already with six in the House and 10 in the Senate if you drew one of the two-year Senate terms after the decennial census.

(Actually, a senator conceivably could draw two two-year terms, then be entitled to two four-year ones, and serve 12 years, plus six in the House.)

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Those are three worthy notions for constitutional amendments. Each warrants substantive and independent debate.

What we apparently are going to get, though, if anything-depending on what the Legislature decides to refer-is the combination of all three into a single take-or-leave proposition.

The simple ethics reform of Regnat Populus, led by Catholic High civics teacher Paul Spencer, and which would pass easily on its own, might get weighted down needlessly by public aversion to the pay-raise and term-limit provisions.

Voters decide these amendments on a narrow and simplified focus, indeed, sometimes on misinformation. The determining factor for fortunes on this three-pronged referral would be whether the focus was on the ethics restrictions, which would be good, or the higher pay for longer service, which would be bad.

I fear the latter. People tend to get more worked up negatively than positively.

We got to this point because Sabin, the freshman Democrat from liberal Little Rock wards, went around to legislators seeking support, and finding not so much, for three bills drawn to enact as statutes the three ethical planks of the Regnat Populus initiative.

Instead, he found, legislators were interested in blending those issues with those of pay and term limits.

Legislators tend not to want to vote for more rigid ethical standards.

But they sure as heck don’t want to vote against them.

As it happened, Woods was coming from the Senate with the idea for a constitutional amendment providing relaxed term limits and an independent commission to get raises for legislators without legislators themselves having anything directly to do with it.

So a marriage was made-or an engagement, more precisely.

The highest cards remain in possession of Regnat Populus.

It could avail itself again of that well-heeled Better Ethics Committee, and of more time than before, to get its basic ethics initiative put on the ballot by a petition drive and passed.

Woods acknowledged as much when he was overheard last week saying that legislators know they are due for a haircut, but would like to pick their own barber.

It’s a fine metaphor, as, possibly, is this one: Maybe different heads of hair require entirely different coiffures. One hairdo might not fit all.

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John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Editorial, Pages 79 on 02/17/2013

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