Budget-writing process should be more transparent

Posted on Sun, Dec. 09, 2007

HERE’S OUR NOMINATION for the first order of business in the House when the Legislature reconvenes in January: earmark disclosure.

We don’t mean to suggest that making legislators attach their names to their budget requests is the most important thing lawmakers need to do, or that only the House needs to do it. Rather, since House Speaker Bobby Harrell has proposed addressing it in a House rules change, it’s the most important thing that they can handle quickly and easily — on the first day, if they’re so inclined. And frankly, we can’t think of a single reason not to do it — at least not one that any legislator would be willing to attach his or her name to.

Reps. Michael Thompson and Nathan Ballentine brought this issue into public focus when they started talking up legislation to require sponsors’ names and explanations be placed on spending items. Borrowing a page from a similar campaign U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint is waging in Washington, they billed it as a way to reduce state spending, particularly of the pork-barrel variety.

Lawmakers certainly need to stop spending so much money on festivals and local museums, particularly since they aren’t adequately providing for public safety and public health and public education. But the reason this proposal is such a good idea has nothing to do with whether you’re a fiscal conservative or a free-spender.

This is just basic good government.

A bill can’t get considered without at least one legislator putting his or her name on it. Neither can an amendment. Yet spending items large and small can and do get into the budget without any fingerprints.

Actually, there are fingerprints, and insiders can match them up to their owners if they want to. But the information is not posted on the Internet or contained in any widely distributed documents, as the names of bill and amendment sponsors are.

In many cases, this isn’t a problem, because legislators usually go home and brag about the bacon they’re delivering. But what we’ve seen in Washington also happens here: Some legislators push spending items that their constituents wouldn’t approve of, items that match up nicely with big campaign donations.

There’s a simple principle here: If a legislator isn’t willing to attach his or her name to a proposal, that proposal shouldn’t be considered. It certainly shouldn’t get included automatically when senior lawmakers and staff in the House and Senate put together the first version of the budget for committees to consider.

The one objection we’ve heard to making this requirement law (or, apparently, a Senate rule change) comes from Senate Finance Chairman Hugh Leatherman, who expressed concerns that the plan wouldn’t work because “what one person considers an earmark another person considers an absolute necessity.”

That’s a good point if you focus on the narrow issue of “pork.” But that’s not where the focus should be. The focus should be on injecting more transparency into the entire budget process, which means that every new item inserted into the budget, whether an appropriation or a proviso, and every change that’s made to existing provisos should be tagged with the names of the sponsors. That’s really not so much to ask. If a lawmaker doesn’t want to be identified with a proposal, there’s probably a good reason.