South Dakota News Watch has a story about concerns that the Legislative Research Council’s new electronic bill management system “has made the legislative process less transparent and has removed some of the human element from lawmaking.” Those concerns, it turns out, are horsehockey.
The LRC’s new system had real transparency problems at the start when it rolled out a rigid PDF-like text format that made it hard for legislators and the public alike to read bills. LRC quickly fixed that problem, and we all now get to use transparency-enhancing features on each bill like links to affected statutes and pending amendments.
But complaints remain from paid lobbyists who don’t like how the system disrupts their special access to the process. Complaints focus on the new process for recruiting co-sponsors for bills. Before this year, the prime sponsors of bills had to carry paper copies around to their colleagues and get physical signatures from legislators who were willing to co-sponsor. The new bill management system apparently give sponsors something like Facebook: prime sponsors send out electronic invites to co-sponsor a bill, and recipients can click yes or no or ignore the request. (I don’t know if invitees can block specific prime sponsors… but come now, we’re all colleagues here, and blocking a fellow legislator would be bad form!)
Now if you work in an office, think any paper form on which you have to get multiple signatures. Think about the time you have to spend walking around, catching people in their offices, waiting for them to get off the phone or out of a meeting, trying back later. Think about how much faster it is to simply send a group e-mail or post to your Slack channel and collect all the authorizations you need online. With an electronic system, you can stay at your desk working on another project. Legislators can recruit co-sponsors and respond to invites over the weekend when they are away from Pierre and spread out across the state. A legislator could even pop open her invite list at a crackerbarrel, project it to a big screen, and say to constituents, “Here are the bills other legislators are asking me to support: what do you think?”
Wow—a little brainstorming leads me to think an online co-sponsorship system could be a great boon for transparency and public education.
David Owen of the Chamber of Commerce doesn’t think so:
…Under the Legislature’s old system, face-to-face contact between lobbyists and legislators was baked in. Lobbyists were able to explain and seek support for bills directly with legislators, answer questions and, most importantly, get a feel for legislators’ thinking on certain issues. Such information could then be passed along to the lobbyists’ employers whether they were nonprofits, associations or businesses.
“It’s important to remember that lobbyists represent actual people,” Owen said.
At any given time during the legislative session, a legislator might be working with three to five organizations on multiple pieces of legislation, Owen said. Legislators work part time and don’t have staffs, so lobbyists, who tend to specialize in issues and industries, sometimes play a bigger role in gathering co-sponsors and explaining bills than legislators.
“I get that we’re viewed skeptically,” Owen said. “But we’re the ones who know the issues, so we’re able to put things in context. That is really important” [Nick Lowrey, “Concerns Arise That New S.D. Electronic Bill Monitoring System Makes Government Less Transparent,” South Dakota News Watch, 2020.02.04].
Ah, so that’s the problem: giving our elected legislators more control and introducing more efficiency makes it harder for unelected lobbyists working for special interests to insert themselves into the process.
Forgive me, but for the general public, I’m not seeing a problem. There’s no loss of transparency for regular citizens here. Regular citizens don’t have time anyway to troll the halls during the first few weeks of Session watching for legislators carrying around co-sponsor sign-up sheets and pouncing on their conversations with colleagues about bills we haven’t seen yet. If there is a transparency issue, it’s the unfair access that paid lobbyists get before the bills are posted. The real transparency fix is not to go back to a slow and obsolete process of paper signature gathering that grants special access to an elite few but to make the bills public the moment prime-sponsors hit the “Invite Co-Sponsors” button. Then everyone with Internet access can preview the bills and explain and recommend them to their legislators.
And hey, if lobbyists are “the ones who know the issues” and are “able to put things in context,” why aren’t they running for office so we can replace the hapless ignorami whom the lobbyists must guide to wisdom?
Senator Troy Heinert (D-26/Mission) appears to share lobbyist Owen’s distaste for the online co-sponsor invitation system:
“We have to make it more personal, like the old system,” Heinert said.
Speaking directly to fellow legislators, lobbyists and the public about legislation is a necessary component of lawmaking and makes for better legislation, Heinert said [Lowrey, 2020.02.04].
Senator Heinert is correct to defend the importance and superiority of face-to-face communication for important processes like crafting legislation and building voting coalitions to pass it (at least in functional democracies where competing interests have to work together and not in one-party regimes where the fate of bills is mostly decided by a handful of elites behind closed caucus doors who tell their underlings what bills they will carry and what talking points they will recite in favor). But the new bill management system doesn’t prohibit face-to-face communication. Legislators and lobbyists can still walk up to each other and talk all they want. But now, instead of having to interrupt their conversations to riffle through their papers or run back to their desks to find their co-sponsor sign-up sheets, they can just whip out their phones, go beep-boop-beep to invite a new co-spsonor, and get right back to their conversation. Legislators don’t have to worry about spilling steak sauce or red wine all over their co-sponsor sheet or getting mixed up in the wee hours and tucking that sign-up sheet into the stripper’s lingering accoutrements instead of a ten-dollar bill.
Once they get used to electronic co-sponsor sign-up, legislators will find that collecting signatures online moves a bureaucratic task online and clears the way for more meaningful face-to-face interactions. As for lobbyists, well, they’re paid good money to figure out ways to insert themselves into the system. When the system changes, they’ll find other paths to influence. Keep innovating, Legislative Research Council! You’re doing the right thing!
It is true that most of the legislatures don’t often know what they are doing and need to have somebody there to steer them. And the citizens can all go to the hallways whenever they want to steer them too. If the online signing up was good, then why don’t all the legislatures just have committee meetings in the Skypes and stay home and vote on bill on the big board posted on the wall like they do anyway? They could just do that from their couches right now.
…Under the Legislature’s old system, face-to-face contact between lobbyists and legislators was baked in. Lobbyists were able to explain and seek support for bills directly with legislators, answer questions and, most importantly, get a feel for legislators’ thinking on certain issues.
Loosely translated…make shady deals in back rooms.
C of C must be worried about losing its clout.
Grdz aka lobbiest murphy seems to want to keep us “out in the halls” instead. Can we get more input from Heinert, Cory?
You know, Grudz, back when I was a Republican, I suggested that Congress do its business via Internet conference to allow Congress critters to do all their work from home, reduce travel costs, and keep them in touch with the home folks. Maybe Legislature-by-Skype wouldn’t be that bad. Legislators could stay in their communities all Session, sleep in their own beds at night, dine at their local cafés at noon to get input from their neighbors… heck, they could stay at the café, open up their laptops, listen to the debates, and make their floor speeches right there, with their voters right beside them to cheer them on.
Professor Nesiba could legislate from his Augustana office, grading papers and checking advisees’ registrations while Republican Senators and Linda Schauer drone on about the family values of low wages and government intrusion in medical decisions. Farmer Overweg could check hog futures and sell some feed at his store between votes. Young parents could legislate from home, put the Session on their big-screen TVs and speakers, and do some cooking and vacuuming between votes.
Sure, Grudz, why not legislate by Skype?
“I get that we’re viewed skeptically,” Owen said. “But we’re the ones who know the issues, so we’re able to put things in context. That is really important.” aka lobbyist-speak
If a point of view should be really important to a lawmaker, so much that the holder of that point of view needs to pay a mouthpiece to convince that lawmaker, that point of view would be just as important to the public. As Cory suggests, post them on the internet for all to see.
*Best solution is to end gifts over $5 with a maximum of $15 total from lobbyists to those they’re trying to persuade.
I try to be even-handed on matters involving lawmaking at the Legislature. I’m not anti-lobbyist. I was one.
I think Owen has a point. Many lobbyists usually do have a far better grasp of what’s happened in the past and why things are the way they are. They focus on one to a few parts of the law and come to know their bailiwick pretty well. They can be a valuable part of the legislative process. While I think the South Dakota Chamber of Commerce is loony tunes on environmental issues most of the time, I appreciate other stands they take.
But lobbyists are just one part of the process, and it is usually not their knowledge that is valued. It’s money and power. Some lobbyists, not all, have a lot of power. Most, not so much. The difference in power is not so much because these lobbyists have superior knowledge, but because they represent interests and people with money and influence. A lobbyist can have superior knowledge about, for example, the problems of the poor or environmental issues, but those lobbyists don’t have the ear of legislators because they don’t have large bags of money to throw at political candidates or parties.
If the poor were rich, South Dakota would have gotten Medicaid expansion passed years ago. But there are rich interests that also would like to see that happen. Sometimes these things aren’t corrupt. It’s just ideological stupidity.
The interesting issues for me always came where interests intersected. As an environmental lobbyist I worked with small businesses involved in recycling to get proper incentives and policies in place for that fledgling industry. And that was when the South Dakota Chamber had no desire to represent those folks. They were too busy trying to turn South Dakota into the nation’s dump site that they couldn’t be bothered with South Dakotans. Similar things happened with the start of the ethanol industry and wind production of energy and pork producers opposed to corporate CAFOs. The so-called smart people had no use for the little guys. They were protecting Big Ag and King Coal.
I think the new way of doing things will begin to even the playing field maybe a little, and make legislators a little less dependent on the lobbyists. Call it an anti-corruption reform.
“Call it an anti-corruption reform.”
Then we can expect the SDGOP to legislate it out of existence ASAP.
I agree with Donald that many lobbyists bring useful knowledge to the part-time legislators who know horses from haystacks but not much else. But we recognize that the new online sponsorship system doesn’t make it impossible for lobbyists to do their job. They’ll adjust.