Transparency News 2/4/16

Thursday, February 4, 2016



State and Local Stories

 

A local judge appointed to the bench in 2014 who inexplicably left his position in late November has returned to work after a 10-week absence that no one will talk about publicly, including the judge. General District Judge Robert Beasley Jr. of Virginia’s 11th Judicial District suddenly and without public explanation left the bench the Tuesday before Thanksgiving and had been absent until Tuesday, when he reappeared to hear civil cases in Dinwiddie General District Court. He heard criminal cases Wednesday in Petersburg General District Court. Several clerks in Powhatan, Dinwiddie and Amelia have declined to talk about Beasley’s absence and referred questions to Chief 11th District Judge Mayo Gravatt. Several chief prosecutors in those localities said in December they had received no official explanation about the judge’s absence.
Richmond Times-Dispatch

Fewer than half of the 2016 General Assembly reported accepting free meals, entertainment, travel or gifts valued at more than $50 between May and October, according to the latest conflict disclosures. Some 72 of 140 members reported no gifts. While recent metrics have shown legislators are less likely to report gifts than in the past, it's difficult to provide a precise comparison with the past. This was first time legislators reported for a six-month period that covers May 1 through October 31. Comparing with past filing periods is difficult because forms do not require lawmakers to provide the date of each gift.
VPAP

National Stories

Legislation to subject Michigan's governor and legislature to the state's Freedom of Information Act could drop as soon as next month, say lawmakers working on the plan. "I've been working on this project now for over a year and hopefully going to roll it out during Sunshine Week in March," said Rep. Ed McBroom, R-Vulcan. Michigan's current FOIA law, which allows the public to access documents from public bodies, specifically exempts the governor. In addition, a 1986 Attorney General's opinion exempts state legislators. These factors recently contributed to Michigan ranking dead last in the nation for transparency.
MLive

A federal judge ruled that the FBI has broken the law by putting systems in place to make it nearly impossible for Americans to get certain information from the agency via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). According to the details of the case, FBI officials went as far as denying FOIA requests about its FOIA procedures. U.S. District Court Judge Randolph Moss ruled that the FBI is “fundamentally at odds” with FOIA requirements designed to keep government agencies transparent to the public. The ruling comes as the result of a lawsuit filed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology PhD student Ryan Shapiro.
Personal Liberty

Flooded with requests for public records, local officials in Washington want to put limits on how much information public servants have to make available to the public.  The concepts have long been enshrined in Washington state law: Information held by the government belongs to the people. Public access to that information is essential to a functioning democracy. But a parade of local officials called for new limits on that access at a hearing in Olympia on Thursday. They shared horror stories of what they called "abusive," "malicious" and "vexatious" requests for records. Tim Clemans, who calls himself a "super requester," has been especially prolific: The Burien programmer has filed thousands of records requests with agencies around Washington state in the past year. He hit the Seattle Police Department with 5,000 requests on a single day in December. His requests have included all records the city of Seattle has ever produced and every email ever sent or received by a Washington state employee.
KUOW


Editorials/Columns

The politics that linger around Obamacare — which has endured constant court challenges and campaigns to kill it in Congress — remain so poisonous that efforts to fix the law have been derailed time and again by Democrats trying to protect it and Republicans afraid of being contaminated. In any case, the medical paralysis in Washington hasn’t yet immobilized everyone in Richmond. State Sen. Emmett Hanger and Del. Tim Hugo, both Republicans, have introduced legislation that would address one of the primary drivers of rising medical costs in America: Exploding pharmaceutical prices. Their parallel bills would require drug companies to provide details on the cost structure for any prescription that costs more than $10,000. The legislation is a reasonable response to unreasonable drug prices and pharmaceutical companies’ complete lack of transparency. The spike in the prices of cheap drugs has generated plenty of attention and outrage, as have the dizzying charges for new therapies, but the relentless, incremental climb of drug prices has alone done considerable damage to medical costs in America.
Virginian-Pilot

The crux of McDonnell’s appeal is that he never did anything tangible for Williams. The businessman may have put up a lot of “quid” in the form of those gifts, but the governor gave him no “quo” in return. His appeals brief argues that the conviction unfairly “criminalizes ordinary politics, turning nearly every elected official into a felon.” If the U.S. Supreme Court buys that argument and overturns McDonnell’s 11 felony convictions, it will confirm his contention he didn’t break federal law. But it will never undercut the notion that McDonnell’s actions were unbelievably sleazy. And in that case, there’s a simple remedy: Congress ought to rewrite the law. So the next time an elected official is caught taking $177,000 from a businessman seeking favors, it’ll be a crime that draws a stint in prison.
Dan Casey, Roanoke Times

On select days during the GA session, you'll find hundreds of bankers in fancy suits, or healthcare workers in lab coats, wandering from office to office. If they're lucky, they get to meet with legislators for a quick talk and photo op; more often they meet with legislative staffers and communicate their concerns through them. Each visit is logged, formally or informally, by the legislative offices, and added to the political calculus that informs legislators' voting decisions. This is what we sometimes mean by "special interests." It's how interest group politics is supposed to work: groups of citizens who benefit from government services get to remind their public officials of why those services are provided in the first place. Not that interest group politics works perfectly. Sometimes "special interests" involve hard-working poor and middle-class students who earn small tuition grants; other times we get billion dollar companies dumping coal ash into our rivers. A theory in political science called "pluralism" argues that everyone's interests are almost always represented through this kind of representative politics, but of course that's not true; not everyone has the time or resources to spend a day wandering around legislative offices. (As political scientist E.E. Schattschneider famously wrote in 1960, "The flaw in the pluralist heaven is that the heavenly chorus sings with a strong upper-class accent.") Still, sometimes the "special interests" are the good guys, and the students with me yesterday are just that: good guys.
RVA Politics

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