Freshman Sen. Dan Squadron, who unaccountably failed to invite me to his wedding, apparently got it in writing from his Democratic conference leaders, before leaving on his honeymoon, that they would bring NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg's school governance bill up for a floor vote. They didn't. When I met Squadron for the first time last month, he complained about a blog post in which I had complained about him leaving a committee meeting where his (mostly laudable) ethics disclosure bills were being discussed. You gotta stick with it like a limpet, I told him, or it's going nowhere. Maybe he'll believe me now.
But even though his ethics bills have not made it to the floor, I understand Squadron and Republican Sen. John Bonacic also introduced the very different ethics reform package passed by the Assembly in June. Most of the differences in the Assembly and Senate ethics bills are in other areas. On ethics disclsosure, the Assembly bill, like Squadron's, includes disclosure provisions that, while far from perfect, would be a major step forward. No longer would all significant information about legislators' private-sector incomes be hidden (i.e. redacted) by the Legislative Ethics Commission.
While you certainly could argue that ethics bills, like everything else, should be publicly debated and amended in the legislative process, that's not how things work in Albany. They often work badly, as in the disastrous ethics "reform" passed under Eliot Spitzer in early 2007. But I'm not aware of anything in the Assembly bill that would be as bad as that -- in fact a major part of it, restoring an independent lobbying commission, would undo what the 2007 law did. And even if the bill has problems, it's likely the best bet for meaningful reform in the near future. If the Senate passed it, I can't see Gov. Paterson vetoing it, even though it differs from his own ethics proposal.
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