It's not just the majority leader sounding clueless about ethics reform, it's also the leader of the New York State Senate Ethics Committee, who was quoted recently as saying: "The people who I represent, they want something done about the economy, their jobs and about taxes. Yes, they want to have their faith restored in government, and we're going to get there -- but it's not on the top of [the list]." Also the deputy majority leader, the guy actually negotiating the bill, who says: “I don’t think there’s any hold-up on the Senate side. I think there’s hold-up on negotiating different points among the three parties. There’s issues involving who polices who, who gets appointments, that sort of thing, the same issues that have come up in the Capitol for the last 100 years.”
If these Republican Senate leaders -- Dean Skelos, Andrew Lanza and Tom Libous -- mean their statements to be reassuring, they are wildly off the mark. It's astonishing that they are letting Democratic Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, a pillar of the Albany status quo throughout his long career, look like a reformer in contrast. (And Republicans in the Assembly have let the issue get away from them.)
There is a cynical but defensible case to be made for the Senate deep-sixing redistricting reform, perhaps by tying it to a demand for a reversal of last year's law which stops upstate districts from including prisoners as residents. There is even a cynical case to be made for Long Island senators trying to protect their school districts from budget cuts.
But there is no case at all for the current state of affairs in Albany in which legislators -- including the most powerful ones like Skelos and Silver -- can and do conceal their private-sector clients and income (which likely dwarfs what they are paid by the taxpayers). It is a recipe for conflict of interest and corruption, as the felony conviction of the prior Republican Senate leader, Joe Bruno, demonstrates.
There have been many other cases of corruption among members of both parties, and vast amounts of hypocrisy on both sides. The Senate Democrats, for example, now calling for ethics and redistricting reform, failed to enact it when they were in power, when their leader, Malcolm Smith, said: "With the Democrats in control of the State Senate, we are going to draw the lines so that Republicans will be in oblivion in the state of New York for the next 20 years."
The Republicans can only afford so much cynicism. Blocking full disclosure of legislators' private incomes and clients would be a bridge too far, not just bad public policy but a defense of corruption that would be impossible to explain to the public.