Wednesday, Aug. 20, 2008

Want to know how your legislator voted? Good luck

I WAS TRYING to figure out what made Gov. Mark Sanford think that the Legislature would do anything other than ratify the Budget and Control Board’s across-the-board budget cuts if it spent the money to come back to town, given its demonstrated refusal to make the kind of targeted cuts he wanted.

He first challenged my assumption, arguing that political pressure might force targeted cuts, particularly since public education was taking a $78 million hit. Then came the kicker: “Even if that was what they did,” he said, “it’s still a recorded vote that everyone takes instead of this third-party action.”

I held my breath. I expected the conference call with editorial writers to erupt into hysterical laughter (it didn’t), since we had all seen the campaign attacking the Legislature for avoiding recorded votes, and editors in Greenville and Charleston had just written editorials about the problem. The smoking gun was a report from the S.C. Policy Council that said just 1 percent of bills that passed the Senate this year and 8 percent that passed the House got a recorded vote.

It is a deeply flawed analysis, to be sure. Start with the artful wording: That’s not 1 percent of the bills considered by the Senate, but 1 percent of those that passed the Senate, which means senators could have killed an equal number on recorded votes and gotten no credit for it. (They didn’t.)

Worse, the report considered only votes to pass the bills, when my friends at the Policy Council are savvy enough to know that many bills rise or fall on the amendments, or on procedural votes. When the Senate votes 40-6 not to table a bill, it then passes the bill on a voice vote. And who cares who voted for a bill that opponents managed to water down with an amendment that makes it pointless? (This does happen, routinely.) The vote on the amendment is what matters.

For a rough idea of the scope of the omissions, consider: The Policy Council found 62 recorded votes in the House in 2008; the House combined 2007 and 2008 and counted 1,102 recorded votes.

Still, the Policy Council’s basic premise is spot-on: Legislators don’t go on the record with their votes nearly enough.

As I noted this spring, there was an alarming drop-off this year in recorded votes on legislation people might actually care about. When the House debated the budget, for instance, I couldn’t find a single recorded vote on an amendment that more than a few dozen people would care about and that wasn’t open to so many interpretations as to be useless in judging legislators.

For the entire session, I couldn’t find a dozen votes — in the House and Senate combined — that I thought worthy of suggesting to the folks at Project Vote Smart for inclusion in their “Key Votes” listing. I thought maybe that was because I ignored some hot issues that I considered unimportant, but even without that bias, Vote Smart still managed to find just 19 recorded votes that it considered significant enough to help voters judge their legislators. (Go to www.VoteSmart.org to see those votes and more information on lawmakers and candidates.)

Those happy with the current system note that a recorded vote is held whenever five senators or 10 representatives request it, which is a good response to attacks from legislators but not to criticism from non-legislators.

Senators further argue that the Senate should get more credit than it does, because the overwhelming majority of bills are passed by unanimous consent. But just once try criticizing a senator for his vote on a bill passed by unanimous consent; if it’s liable to get him in trouble with voters, he’ll swear he was in a committee meeting, or in the lobby talking with a constituent, when the vote was taken, and there’s nothing you can do to disprove him.

So yes, we absolutely need to find a way to put legislators on the record. The problem is where to draw the line.

The Post and Courier of Charleston reports that all but nine states have a constitutional requirement for a recorded vote on final passage of bills. That’s the easy way to draw a line, but like the Policy Council analysis, it misses some of the most important votes. It also requires a recorded vote on hundreds of bills that no one would ever possibly object to, which, in one of the more defensive responses I can recall, the House has calculated to cost $55 a pop for the paper, printing, staff time, maintenance, power and technology fees.

Rep. Nikki Haley has persuaded Senate President Pro Tem Glenn McConnell to join her in pushing for a law that requires recorded votes on all “matters that significantly impact taxpayers or benefit legislators personally or professionally or that spend money.” That’s better than nothing, but this fixation on spending leaves out such important matters as DUI reform, student testing requirements and even the immigration bill that so consumed lawmakers this year.

My proposal: Let’s make it an acknowledged understanding — no, a House or Senate rule, or even a law — that a legislator will be counted as having voted in the majority on an unrecorded vote unless he or she puts a statement in the Journal to the contrary.

The beauty of this is that we don’t have to worry about drawing a line that fits every occasion; once they figure out how much trouble it is to keep up with every vote they might not want to be seen as supporting, legislators will do that for us, by calling for a lot more recorded votes.

Ms. Scoppe can be reached at cscoppe@thestate.com or at (803) 771-8571.