Influence-peddling fills power vacuum in Legislative State

A MAJOR ELEMENT in the continuing saga of mismanagement in the city of Columbia is City Council members’ habit of meddling in the day-to-day operations of the government.

This practice of bypassing the city manager and asking his underlings to handle individual council members’ requests is cited in study after study as one of the city’s central problems. No one seriously disputes its impropriety: The City Council’s job is to set the policy; the city manager’s job is to see to it that the policy is implemented appropriately in each individual case.

Walk a few blocks down Main Street, and the situation changes dramatically. Not only is it routine for state legislators to call up state employees and tell them how to do their jobs, but legislators defend the meddling as a proper part of their jobs.

Last week, no less than House Speaker Bobby Harrell didn’t just defend but actually endorsed the actions of Rep. Grady Brown, who called a high-ranking State Transport Police officer to tell him how to enforce the law in one part of his district. An elected official should intervene if he believes a constituent has been treated unfairly, Mr. Harrell said; that’s his job.

Senate Ethics Chairman Wes Hayes did allow as how “we may need to define where advocacy stops and interference begins,” but even he said there’s nothing clearly wrong with legislators intervening with law enforcement when their constituents get in trouble.

The fact that two honorable lawmakers would react this way illustrates what happens when there is no clear separation of powers between the executive and legislative branches, when we have an unchecked Legislature: No one even notices the rot, because it has permeated the entire political culture.

When we complain that there are inadequate checks and balances among the three branches of government, we’re usually referring to the fact that the chief executive — the governor — has little or no direct control over more than two-thirds of the executive branch. And that’s the case with the Transport Police and its sister agency, the Highway Patrol; he can hire the director of the Department of Public Safety but can’t fire him, and the troopers know that.

But to make matters worse, this creates a vacuum of power — one that is filled, not by the Legislature as a whole, but by individual legislators. Without a co-equal governor to protect them, executive branch employees know they’d better not risk upsetting the wrong individual legislator. They know how much trouble a single legislator, who answers to only a fraction of the state electorate, can cause them — with a phrase inserted in the right place in a larger bill, or a targeted cut to an agency’s budget. So favors get done. And it’s so commonplace that legislators don’t think it’s wrong.

Some legislators who call up state employees do take great care to tell them they’re not asking for favors, just sharing information, or just asking for them to act. And some of them sincerely mean this. Others don’t. Rank-and-file state employees often have no way of knowing which is which. The result is that laws are enforced erratically, and some voters’ interests are “protected” more than others, depending on how willing their legislators are to provide such “constituent services.” And other legislators applaud those who do this best.

That hardly seems like a good or smart or fair way to run a government. But in the system we have, it’s probably what we ought to expect.