August 29, 2005

Kurita: Former Lawmakers Should Be Banned from Lobbying Forever

State Sen. Rosalind Kurita, a candidate for the Democratic Party nomination for the U.S. Senate from Tennessee, said lawmakers at the state and federal level should be forbidden permanently from becoming lobbyists after they leave office, and pledged to propose such legislation in the U.S. Senate if she's elected.

Kurita also said two sitting state senators who have been indicted for allegedly accepting bribes should resign "if they're guilty," and announced her proposals for sweeping ethics reforms at the national level.

She announced her proposals at the first Nashville-area political bloggers' lunch, which organizers plan as a monthly event for Nashville-area political bloggers to meet with elected officials and candidates and discuss issues in an informal and nonpartisan way.

Bloggers attending the first lunch, held at Nashville's Midtown Café, were myself, Mark Rose, Bob Krumm, Roger Abramson, Sharon Cobb, Josh Tinley, Joey Hood, Blake Wylie, and Adam Groves. The group included more conservative/Republican bloggers than liberal/Democratic, but three other bloggers - one conservative and two liberals - who had planned to attend had to cancel for various reasons.

Kurita's proposals for federal-level ethics reforms include: ending the revolving door with a ban on former members of Congress lobbying Congress, making Congressional districts fair by creating an independent commission to guide redistricting "so average citizens have a fair shot at winning a seat in the government," ending lobbyist-funded trips for lawmakers, requiring more frequent and more detailed reports of lobbyists' expenses because "it should be easy for the public to find out what Member of Congress was lobbied, what legislation was discussed, and how much was spent."

Kurita also proposes requiring lobbyists to report money spent on "grassroots" efforts to influence legislation (such as advertisements urging people to "call Congressman so-and-so and tell them to vote no" on a specific bill – and "real penalties" for lobbyists who file late or inaccurate reports or break the ethics laws.

Kurita said she believes state lawmakers also should be permanently banned from becoming lobbyists, calling the proposed one-year "cooling off" period "not realistic" and ineffective because even after a lawmaker has been out of office for a year, "it's about relationships and your peers are still your peers."

With today's headline out of the state Capital in Nashville being the announcement by indicted state Rep. Chris Newton that he will resign effective Nov. 1, Kurita was asked if she though the two sitting state senators facing similar indictments – Democrat Ward Crutchfield and Democrat Kathryn Bowers – should also resign.

"My intuition is to say yes," Kurita said. "However, in this country we are innocent until proven guilty" Saying that only Crutchfield and Bowers "know in their heart if they're innocent or guilty," Kurita says, "If they're guilty they should resign."

Kurita's ethics push isn't new - long before Operation Tennessee Waltz, Kurita sponsored and passed legislation putting the state's Registry of Election Finance data online. Previously, a member of the media or public could only get information about a state elected official's campaign donations by visiting the Registry office in person and signing a form – and the elected official was notified who had asked to look at their records. Kurita called that "intimidating," and said such information should be accessible to everyone anonymously, as it now is online.

I'll have more to add to this post later today...

MORE:
Some other issues Kurita discussed with the bloggers included energy policy, the war in Iraq, judicial nominations, and U.S. Rep. Harold Ford Jr., her rival for the Democratic nomination, derisively calling members of the American military serving in Iraq "oil cops."

Kurita, whose state senate district includes a portion of Fort Campbell, clearly respects the military and the job they're doing in Iraq and she clearly thinks the war is going better than the mainstream press portrays it, a reasonable view given that she often speaks with members of the military who have served in Iraq and who tell her about far more than just the latest car bombing that dominates mainstream press coverage.

On the other hand, she believes the war is driven by America's need for Middle East oil, stating the long-term view that "the way we get out of Iraq is we have our own energy sources."

She criticized the big energy bill recently passed by Congress that would give big subsidies to big energy companies, and called instead for tax incentives or other subsidies for developing alternatives such as biodiesel, geothermal, solar and wind power. She declared support for "every single thing" that would help the nation become independent of Middle East oil - but, immediately afterward, when I asked if that included more domestic drilling for oil off the coast of the United States or in the tiny corner of the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge set aside decades ago for future oil exploration, Kurita said no.

Lowering speed limits would save more oil than drilling in Alaska would produce, she claimed, but wouldn't go as far as declaring support for Congressional action to lower speed limits.

So when Kurita said we should do "every single thing" to become energy independent, she didn't really mean every single thing, just everything on the liberal side of the agenda.

But if Kurita is right that we won't get our troops home from Iraq and out of harm's way until we're energy independent, then how is it moral or right to not do something - drilling for oil in Alaska and off our own coasts - that would speed that process along?

On the war in Iraq, Kurita avoided the simplistic liberal description of how President Bush lead us into war as Bush "lied" about weapons of mass destruction.

I didn't write all of this quote down, but to the best of my recollection is she said this: "I'm not going to bash the president We made decisions. We have hindsight now and that colors things. We had one set of information that we believed was true then and we have another set of information now that we believe is true."

Kurita says that, given the information available back before the invasion, if she had been in the U.S. Senate, "I would have supported" the war resolution.

I asked Sen. Kurita what she thought of Ford calling our troops "oil cops," even allowing for it to be his shorthand way of saying we wouldn't need to be in Iraq if it wasn't for our dependency on imported oil.

"It doesn't feel right," she said. She said more than that, but that sums it up pretty well. (Meaning: That's the only part that I wrote down - when Sharon Cobb posts a transcript of the discussion, I might add more!)

Incidentally, I think Kurita - and Ford - are wrong that we wouldn't need to be in Iraq if we didn't need Middle East oil. If five years ago someone had invented a way to make every American car and truck run on grass clippings, and we had converted the entire fleet of vehicles to grass clippings and could get all the grass clippings we needed each week from the American suburbs each Saturday morning, an Iraq headed by a madman who had used weapons of mass destruction, had links to international Islamist terrorism, and had billions of dollars of oil revenue would still have represented a potential threat in the post-9/11 world.

Even if we didn't need a drop of Middle Eastern oil, the rest of the world does, and Saddam would still have been in position to take his billions of dollars of oil revenue and restart his WMD programs. With his known and suspected links to Islamist terror groups and even to al Qaeda, an oil-enriched madman developing WMD is a threat even to an American that needed none of his oil.

Also, it's a bit wrongheaded to say we must do "every single thing" we can to become independent of imported oil, but then categorically refuse to allow drilling in a tiny fragment of our own country that the Carter administration and Congress set aside for just that very purpose.

Oil from the ANWR is predicted to be equal to what we'll get from Saudi Arabia for the next 30 years - and similar predictions of how much oil was under the North Slope turned out to be very low. And Americans would get the jobs that would come with developing ANWR oil.

I didn't press Kurita for her views on increased drilling off the American coast, in places like Florida, and I won't presume to guess here - though if her campaign wishes to clarify, I'll certainly bring that information to you.

On judicial nominations, Kurita seemed to agree that nominees should get an up-or-down vote, and said she believes that vote should come after the Senate, in its "advise and consent" role, has gathered "all the information."

"I think for myself," she said. "We do no one a service if we blindly vote the way someone tells us to vote."

Kurita also dropped this little bit of information: Originally from Midland, Texas., she went to high school with current First Lady Laura Bush.

Other bloggers report in...
Blake Wylie: Lunch with Kurita
Sharon Cobb promises a wrap-up soon.
Mark Rose of Right Minded has a very good wrap-up that sums up all the issues discussed, even some I skipped in my overview. He also has a good photo of the event.
Joey Hood promises his summary and thoughts tomorrow.
No word yet from Josh Tinley, Bob Krumm or Roger Abramson.
Adam Groves discusses what Kurita might do if she loses the primary - a question he notes that Kurita answered "with perhaps the only blatant non-answer of the soiree."

And so, that's it. The first Nashville Area Political Bloggers Lunch is in the history books, having generated some Genuine Grade-A USDA Choice Breaking News and good insight into a serious candidate's serious policy proposals and positions.

Next time you see the mainstream media parachute into the early months of the Senate campaign to report on fundraising and polls rather than issues, remember that.

The next candidate on the bloggers' grill is likely to be former U.S. Rep. Ed Bryant, who is running for the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate. He and his campaign staff has committed to having him attend, though the lunch - likely in late September - has not yet been scheduled. If you're a Nashville-area or Tennessee political blogger interested in landing one of the limited invites, please email me at bill-at-billhobbs.com.

We're striving for partisan balance, so bleeding heart commie libs and neocon wingnuts are equally encouraged to participate.

UPDATE: In a related development, Harold Ford Jr. spent the day focused on the serious issues.