The Daily News is reporting that Sen. Toby Ann Stavisky sees no conflict of interest connected to her son's employment as a lobbyist. No more did former Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno, or Albany Mayor Jerry Jennings, or umpteen other pols. Getting between a politician and his child can be dangerous is the headline of this week's column by Alan Chartock (who spills some negative gossip, not connected to lobbying, about Mario Cuomo), and I take his point. Furthermore, it's not that easy to write laws regulating this. Still ...
The well-respected longtime former Lobbying Commission Executive Director David Grandeau, in testimony this week before a Senate committee, supported new ethics legislation but said, "such action is rarely a cure-all. What matters most -- and this is my key message to you today -- is that raising ethical standards does not necessarily require new rules. It requires a commitment to ensuring that we find capable honest individuals to run the new integrity commissions that seem to sprout up like weeds after every new scandal."
In a similar vein, while we're crafting or waiting or hoping for better laws, how about if people tried to live up to a higher standard than they are legally obliged to? For example, this week legislative leaders have make significant and laudable commitments to passing bills to give the public, for the first time, meaningful information about legislators' private-sector incomes. So while we're waiting for such laws to emerge from Albany's three-man room (and it could be a long wait), how about if those leaders go ahead and reveal their own personal income information? (I think one of them, Malcolm Smith, who as I have reported has a notably uninformative 2008 disclosure form on file with the Legislative Ethics Commission, has now pledged to do that.)
And how about if politicians encourage their children to become doctors or lawyers or cowboys and such, but to stay out of the lobbying trade?
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