Sounds great!

Now if they also have a rules change or whatever so that there are the traveling committees like last session where committees met outside of Salem a few times, and promise that unlike 2005 all budget discussions will be in open committee work sessions rather than in small closed rooms, we will again have a legislature to admire.

Anyone else curious/concerned about the fourth bullet point possibly abridging one's First Amendment right to free speech and/or petition? Seems like one might be able to make a cogent legal argument against the relevant sections in SB 10, but what do I know?

The funding provision deserves significant praise and support.

The rest of these, however, are more window dressing than anything else. In particular, the lobbying provision sounds better on the surface than it may be when examined more critically. Aside from Chris's legitimate question, (another demonstration of why we need to amend the Oregon Constitution to declare corporations have no civil rights because they aren't persons), the big unanswered question is whether the actual stats of elected officials becoming lobbyists AFTER their service in government for an industry with which they weren't already associated BEFORE they entered government service show that we actually have a problem in this regard.

I certainly have not come across much evidence of this when I have looked for it. This is the scenario that should be of most concern, but based on the irrational arguments folks made to defend their beliefs on the M46 thread I doubt folks care to understand why.

On the other hand, I think there is a pretty good chance that Courtney and Brown understand all of that as successful Oregon politicians, and they will benefit politically from their effort to pass this measure.

big unanswered question is whether the actual stats of elected officials becoming lobbyists AFTER their service in government for an industry with which they weren't already associated BEFORE they entered government service show that we actually have a problem in this regard.

As I recall, Mark Simmons became a lobbyist for the nursery industry some days before he ended being Speaker. Someone out there should know if his occupation before becoming Speaker was working in the nursery industry or something totally different.

So far then, we have 1 out of (how many?) dozen of retired legislators several years ago who are the model of corruption many folks think is the biggest problem.

Now, while I personally disapprove of what he did as being unethical, (and disagree most of his voting record), I contend a lot of folks here who uncritically embrace the concept of "citizen legislator" would have a hard time making a defensible logical and ethical case against the totality of his behavior. Just citing this highly debatable case, and trying to reason from that, would be one example of that. (I recognize that is not what LT and Kari are doing here, by the way.)

Let's think about the economic decision making expected in Oregon of the average working class person who might consider public office:

If he or she actually is motivated to enter public service, the act itself redounding in part to the benefit in part of the "progressive" community that I think we can find evidence from recent elections is more economically advantaged than a lot on the right we criticize, he or she may even actually have to decrease his or her standard of living to fulfil the stereotype notion of citizen, and therefore poorly paid, legislator. Then, after doing that for however many terms he or she decides to serve and is elected, he or she is expected to return to private life without benefitting even indirectly from the significant expenditures of time and energy over that period in service to constituents whose values he or she represented.

What's wrong with expectations and sense of entitlement by some ethics' reformers in that picture?

I'd suggest the path to ethics' reform requires more wisdom and careful approach to the problem that what in part seems to be gratuitous, albeit popular, politics by Courtney and Brown.

I am not sure if Frank Dufay intended it, but his comment raised an important point:

But it was OK for Rick Metsger to work as a hired speaker at that same confab 'cause he got an OK from the Ethics Commission. (Well, except part of that "Ok" was as long as he wasn't there in his capacity as an elected official...but that's another issue, I s'posse as to just why he was there.)

The GSPC folks themselves, including the staff, aren't exactly the brightest bulbs on the tree when it comes to even understanding the material they deal with (and I can say that after trying to get answers from that about even simple procedural questions in a case concerning a legislator). Of course, we only have the people and process through which they are selected to blame for that. As in the case of Metsger, too often they get hopelessly lost in trivialities and wordplay because they just don't quite have what it takes to grasp where the substance lies.

They also sometimes try to bail out of a intellectual conundrum into which they work themselves through their inability to reason clearly by then citing statutory constraints on their powers. But then making that argument requires the ability to reason clearly ..., well, you can see the problem.

One of the unfortunate shortcomings we in the NW and Oregon have in our civic character is that we explicitly view reporting as the substitute for true standards for ethics in government. That is, so long as people report activites that may be unethical in the true sense of that word, it's OK because it is up to the voters to decide whether those people should represent them.

I'm all for stronger reporting and the "weak" form of that theory. Reporting can induce outrage which can result in the voters sometimes doing the right thing. However, our desire to hold onto our ill-formed notions of government quite arguably has led people to have a focus on reporting that has largely erased a genuine notion of ethics in government from the public civic mind, and replaced it with a charicarture theory of ethics that focuses on meaningless trivialities.

Courtney and Brown's bill demonstrates this to a large degree, as does the GSPC ruling in the Metsger case.

<h2>Note: Before anybody starts trying to rebut, please have the intellectual integrity to acknowledge that I have endorsed 1) increased funding for the GPSC as part of the solution to making them and our ethics enforcement more credible AND 2) increased and rigorous reporting standards. My argument is those steps are all but meaningless unless they are accompanied by an intelligent approach to actually establishing credible ethics standards and by demonstrating the will to enforce them through meaningful legislation rather than what Courtney and Brown have proposed.</h2>