Thursday, Jun. 11, 2009

Scoppe: The transparency reform that wasn’t

I’VE HAD THIS nagging item on my “to-do” list since mid-January: Re-read House and Senate roll-call voting rules; count votes.

It became obvious by, oh, the first or second week of the legislative session that the heralded rules that both bodies passed at the start of the year were a sham. Or, at the least, that they weren’t all they were cracked up to be.

But, well, it’s been sort of hectic around here, and besides, the S.C. Policy Council and recorded-voting poster girl Rep. Nikki Haley had gone out of the way to praise the new rules. Even Gov. Mark Sanford, in his State of the State address, heaped accolades on the House and Senate for adopting them. And while there certainly are those who like to run up their scores by declaring victory even when they haven’t really won, Mr. Sanford is not among them. To the contrary, he’s apt to declare defeat when he’s won practically everything he asked for, because ... well, I’ll leave you to ponder that.

Anyway, with all that satisfaction out there, I kept pushing the task down on my list, figuring I must have been just too distracted to notice all that excess accountability at Assembly and Main.

Rep. Haley started clamoring for more accountability about mid-way through the session, but she was calling for a lot more than just recorded voting, and that part she couched mainly in terms of needing to codify the rules changes into state law. I never noticed any acknowledgment that her great victory wasn’t all that great. So I kept delaying.

Finally, the Policy Council has put an end to my procrastination — by raising the alarm, and by doing most of the work for me.

The group reports that just 31 percent of House votes and just 16 percent of Senate votes were recorded this year. Or, as its news release proclaimed: “2009 General Assembly voted anonymously 75 percent of time.”

The Policy Council’s Bryan Cox ticks off a few of the items that passed on unrecorded voice votes: authorization for USC to erect another building in the Innovista, a special tax exemption for air carriers operating a hub terminal facility, a $5,000 biennial license fee for micro-distilleries, a ban on local residency restrictions for sex offenders that exceed state law, a new $150-$300 fee for salt water fishing piers and charter fishing vessels. You can find more at scpolicycouncil.com, or by perusing the House and Senate journals, at scstatehouse.gov.

This has been a difficult issue for me. I raised the issue of the disturbing uptick in unrecorded votes back during the 2008 legislative session, months before it became the cause celebre of the Sanford crowd, noting how difficult it had become to find roll-call votes on any important legislation. This tears at the very soul of representative democracy, which is based on the idea of voters electing people to represent their best interests and then holding them accountable for how well they do that. You can’t hold people accountable for their overall voting record when that record doesn’t exist.

At the same time, though, I have never been convinced that there’s a particularly good solution, short of having a Legislature full of responsible people with good sense and a real commitment to accountability.

The simplistic approach of requiring all votes to be recorded would be so cumbersome and time-wasting that it would prevent the Legislature from accomplishing what little it does accomplish. That’s because the overwhelming majority of bills the Legislature considers are such routine, devoid-of-controversy measures as updating outdated language or clearing up confusion in a way that all sides agree to. And it is not uncommon for lawmakers to consider dozens of bills, and many more procedural motions, in a single day. Multiply that by the three minutes House rules require for each electronically recorded vote, or the time it takes for senators to vote aloud when their names are called — and then to change their votes, or wander back into the chamber and cast a belated vote — and you begin to understand the needlessly disruptive impact of a record-all-votes rule.

So obviously, lines must be drawn. But where?

The lines the House and Senate drew this year sound, to the uninitiated, like they make sense and include a lot more than they exclude: mandatory recorded votes on passage of all contested bills, all spending bills, tax bills, all ethics bills. The Policy Council has provided a numeric demonstration of how all-inclusive those requirements are not.

But even that doesn’t get at the biggest problem with the line-drawing, which is this: The real debate is rarely over passage of a bill. It’s over the amendments, which make or break the bills. With very few exceptions, the rules do not require recorded votes on amendments. And even if they did, that still wouldn’t tell you who’s responsible for a bill or an amendment passing or failing, because the battles are lost or won via procedural votes — motions to delay a debate, to give one side time to round up support, to table an amendment, to shut down the debate and vote immediately. Those are the votes that need to be recorded if you hope to assign responsibility.

Last fall, the House adopted a rule that essentially said that everyone would be recorded as voting on the prevailing side of any matter, unless they notified the clerk that they wanted to be counted as voting “no.” That was pretty much what I had proposed in a moment of exasperation, suggesting that such a rule would quickly result in legislators, on their own, demanding recorded votes on everything that really needed to be recorded, because they would get so tired of having to make all those individual arrangements to be recorded as they wanted to.

But the rest of the transparency crew called this a sham, and shamed the House into abandoning it in favor of the delineated listing of matters to be voted on. We see how well that’s worked. Maybe it’s time to actually try the Scoppe proposal.

Ms. Scoppe can be reached at cscoppe@thestate.com.

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