15 April 2005

Legislators, Lobbyists, and ethics

This is probably all very boring to many of my readers but I find it interesting and it's my blog. Mandy Dawson, the idiot state Senator who asked lobbyists for money so she could take a trip to South Africa, has been reprimanded by the Senate. Whoop-ti-do.

I don't know what I was expecting. I know what I was hoping for, but I guess I wasn't really expecting that. The St. Pete Times today has an article--one of several in the state--discussing Mandy's misfortune. She was kicked off the ethics committee, at least, since even as ethically challenged a body as the Florida Legislature knows it's unseemly to have a member of the ethics committee facing an ethics violation. Now if the UN would just follow the same rules and kick Libya and Sudan off the Human Rights Commission we'd be all set.

I like the article's discussion of what Mandy was doing while the charges were read--namely, responding to emails via her Blackberry. Yep, that's contrition all right. She sure seems sorry about what she did. Then she takes the floor to talk about a puppy she had when she was a little kid. What does she think, she's fucking Nixon? Give it up, honey.

Senator Pruitt said that what she did was, at least in part, for her own gain. Look here, it was entirely for her own gain. Her caucus was taking a trip to South Africa. It mattered not a whit whether Mandy was on that trip or not, not a whit to the South Africans, not a whit to Mandy's constituents. The trip was taken to drum up business. One person would have been enough. Mandy did not need to go for any conceivable public policy reason.

Mandy also didn't have the money to pay her own way. Too bad, so sad. She grew up poor, you'd think she'd understand that sometimes you can't afford to do what you want. I want to buy a Cessna and a penthouse in Trump Tower Tampa, but I don't have that kind of money. I'd love to take a vacation to South Africa, too, but again, money inserts itself as a prohibiting factor. How many of Mandy's constituents could have afforded to go to South Africa? Probably very few. So why did Mandy need to go? Bottom line, she didn't. But, as a legislator, she understood the give and take that we politely call lobbying, and she knew that if she wrote to some lobbyists and asked them for money, they'd have a hard time saying no. A lobbyist is loathe to upset anyone he or she lobbies, and rightly so. Do you think perhaps Mandy's door will be open just a bit wider to the three folks who sent her checks than the ones who didn't? Honestly, what do you think?

What it comes down to is that there was no public policy reason for Mandy to go on the trip, and her inability to afford it is no valid excuse for her to soliticit funds from people paid to tell her what legislation to support. Merely removing her from the ethics committee hardly qualifies as good enough in this circumstance, and Mandy's own words and actions relating to the affair clearly indicate that she has learned nothing whatsoever from this episode. The only like change in her behavior in the future will be an attemp to better hide her ethical lapses.

Mandy Dawson may have worked hard to get where she is, but if this is how she works, there's no value in it and she is deserving of no accolade, nor of continued electoral support. But that's merely the truth, and the truth, as we know, has no bearing on the world of politics.

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