What Is Goin’ On?

Common Cause of Georgia has several legislative intiatives which are (or should be) important to us all. In this interview, Bill Bozarth, Executive Director, and Jim Kulstad, their lobbyist, discuss their hopes for the 2008 Georgia Legislature.

While the budget and tax reform aren’t generally the focus of Common Cause, they did point out that they are concerned that the House eliminated funds from the Secretary of State’s budget to provide for voter education regarding the new Voter ID requirements. They hope to get these funds restored during the budget process.

At center stage of Common Cause’s priorities is SB 372 which seeks to give counties and cities a shove in the direction of ethics reform. Got a problem with a county commissioner or city councilman giving a buddy a contract to provide some service to the local government? What do you do? At this time there is not much you can do other than at the polls, unless the local paper publicizes the matter. If this legislation passes, citizens would have the right to file an ethics complaint. Only time will tell if such efforts will actually accomplish anything, but anything that helps shed the light of day on politicians and government has my support.

If you have been paying attention to the controversy over the planned development of the beach at Jekyll Island, you will want to know that Senator Jeff Chapman’s efforts to get the legislature to do something (anything really) to limit development of the beach have been rebuffed by the gurus of development-at-all-cost, the Georgia Republican Party. There is just too damn much money going to be made by Linger Longer, Mercer Reynolds and good ole Republican contributors to Gov. Perdue to let this gold mine get stopped by something as silly as the will of the people of Georgia. I have a lot of respect for Sen. Chapman who seems to be focused on trying to do what is right. I just wonder if his struggles to get the attention of the Republican leaders in the Georgia legislature might get him to change parties.

From my perspective, one of the Common Cause initiatives of utmost importance is judicial election reform. I don’t care whether you are conservative or liberal, you should want our courts to be fair, but above all, independent. Judicial elections were never a big deal and then the Supreme Court (US, and BTW not elected) gave us Roe v Wade, the abortion decision. While the efforts to change the Supreme Court dealt with judicial appointments, it has been broadened into attacks on state courts and state judicial elections. This undermining of the American judicial system is organized and funded by the U. S. Chamber of Commerce. Their goal: elect conservative judges who would favor business interest. As a result, these bastards of business target judges in various states. The Chamber has basked in successfully attacking good judges in several states such as Mississippi and West Virginia. They tried in 2006 to elect their guy, Mike Wiggins, to the Supreme Court of Georgia. They failed but that doesn’t mean they won’t keep coming.

But the bad side of the Chamber’s efforts to politicize the judiciary is that a race for the Supreme Court can now cost a million dollars or more. I don’t know how you can expect a judge who is supposed to be non-political, fair and independent to go out and raise a million dollars. Common Cause wants to change all that and have judicial elections publically funded. You can read more about the proposal here, and you can sign a petition supporting this endeavor here.

Common Cause doesn’t really expect the legislation to pass this session and is forcusing on a public awareness campaign. A resolution in the House would establish a study committee to study judicial elections and make recommendations at the 2009 session.