Speakers debate how to address Albany corruption

Two political observers hashed out the topic of cleaning up Albany at a forum on corruption at the Valley Stream American Legion on April 7, debating the efficacy of proposed solutions like term limits and higher pay in front of a small group of attendees.

“We are in the middle of what many of us have called a crisis of corruption in our state government,” said moderator Susan Lerner, executive director of Common Cause New York, the regional chapter of a national good government group. “A stream of legislators have been indicted and on trial for public corruption, and actually convicted of public corruption.”

Lerner asked whether the state has reached a tipping point for an issue that has become all but accepted as intractable by voters and lawmakers after several decades of the same complaints. She noted that 48 percent of voters in a poll said that they wanted their incumbent representative to be voted out of office, a departure from a longtime trend of voters thinking that their representative was honest person surrounded by corruption.

Jessica Proud, a Republican strategist, said she doubted that banning outside income for legislators, who make about $80,000 annually with additional allowances, or giving them a pay raise would have prevented convicted Democratic ex-Assembly speaker Sheldon Silver from committing his crimes because he was making millions from them. Proud asked what “magic number” would be enough of a salary to deter politicians from wanting more.

“Politics is always going to attract people that have huge egos and are attracted to power,” she said. “It’s just the nature of the business, so I’d rather have a different set of solutions to going after it than giving people a pay raise.”

Proud said she wasn’t sure if corruption is worse or if prosecutors are just being more aggressive. She advocated for term limits for legislators, reasoning that more time in office equals more time exposed to the temptations of using the office’s influence for personal gain.

Dan Janison, a political columnist for Newsday, countered that the checks on power should come from voters who should be engaged enough to not elect “questionable” leaders, which he said — to the six-person audience — might be like “waiting for the Messiah.” Janison said that a distinction should be made between personal ethics and codes of conduct, and that a person’s ethics can’t be legislated.

“What we’re talking about here is codes of conduct, but that is a linguistic problem because we convince ourselves that we’re making people ethical,” he said.

Lerner said that the rules for codes of conduct in New York are “very vague,” and that officials are left to determine where the line is, with some being better at it than others. “If there were clearer guidance, if there were better enforcement in Albany — not relying on taking people out in handcuffs all the time, which is a pretty blunt instrument for helping people to find appropriate conduct … do you think that would make the difference?”

Proud said that such measures could, but that those initiatives can fail to properly address the problems. She cited the Joint Commission on Public Ethics, which she called a “disaster” for its desire to classify people in public relations as lobbyists, which would require them to officially disclose to the state their routine contact with the press. “It does absolutely nothing about fixing any of the problems in the state,” she said.

Janison said he thought that Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s intent for JCOPE was to give gubernatorial appointees a view of the activities of legislators, which he suggested meant that term limits would tilt the balance of power in favor of the governor. Lerner said that her group’s national policy is to oppose term limits because voters should be the ones determining how long they want an individual in office. Proud said that term limits could reduce the pressure that officials feel to get re-elected, freeing them to focus on making decisions that are better for their constituents than for their re-election.

As the forum drew to a close, Proud said that the press and competitive elections in a healthy two-party political system go a long way to offsetting corruption. Janison said that the two-party system is flawed in that the parties can collude to control boards of elections and other supposedly independent bodies, and suggested that having power divided between five or six parties could work better.