Few New Yorkers realize that our state legislators are part-timers.  If you’re a populist, you might call them citizen-legislators.  If you’re a cynic, you might call them scoundrels. But the fact is that “part-time” assemblymen and senators in the State of New York have outside jobs, and since most of them are lawyers, most of the outside jobs are with law firms and involve representing clients.  Some wags might suggest that their clients don’t hire them for their mad lawyering skills.

Following the embarrassing cases of former Senate majority leader Joseph Bruno and Assemblyman Anthony Seminerio, the legislature passed an ethics bill requiring disclosure of private business dealings.  Governor Paterson immediately promised to veto the bill as inadequate.

“While there are some good aspects of the ethics bill passed today by the Legislature, it does not go far enough to address the underlying issues that have caused the people of New York to lose faith and trust in their government,” he said.

While there are many glaring gaps in the ethics bill, perhaps the most notable is that the disclosure doesn’t include private law clients.

The argument is that the identities of law clients is privileged information, and to require a legislator to reveal his clients’ identities and the fees paid would breach the attorney/client relationship.  The New York Times editorial argues that this is wrong.

Now the New York City Bar Association has said that a claim of attorney-client privilege is no excuse. In a well-argued statement last week, the respected group said these legislators should be required to disclose the names of their clients, their fees and a clear description of the work provided for such fees. This is good news for New York’s voters, who need to be sure that all elected officials are putting the state’s interests first.

It’s curious that the issue has been completely resolved as far as criminal defense lawyers are concerned with regard to both identities and fees (just ask Caplin & Drysdale or Goldberger & Dubin), yet remains in question when it comes to legislators.  But the question remains, if lawyer-legislators are required to disclose their clients, will that clean up the ethical morass of Albany?  Not in this Plato’s Republic.

The ethics bill passed in Albany is being characterized as a step in the right direction.  If so, it’s about as small a step as could conceivably be taken.  There is little question that those entities and individuals who are handing over checks to legislators to keep them in cashmere hold some greater sway than does the sincere, but non-paying, constituent.  Hey, a guy’s got to eat, right?

While transparency is the flavor of the month, it’s at best a means to ethical oversight, not ethical behavior in itself.  And as means to an end goes, it’s so anemic that it would be on life-support before it was ever implemented.  There are just too many ways to circumvent it, not to mention that the only ones who would bother to note disclosure are lobbyists for the other side.  Citizens won’t know and won’t care.  It’s all inside-Albany baseball, and doesn’t alter the fact that legislators’ time is being bought and paid for by somebody.  That, not disclosure, is the problem.

The flaw is the perpetuation of the myth that legislators are part-timers.  There’s nothing part-time about it, taking up their every day and, for the most part, their every night as well, as they appear at fund-raisers, constituent functions, union halls, corporate conferences and gala charity balls.  Every second that legislators aren’t absolutely required to be sitting in chambers is spent fundraising.  Currency is the currency of Albany.  You can’t do the People’s work if you can’t afford to be re-elected.

Rather than nip around the edges of ethics, and fight the wrong battles since they do little to improve the clear conflicts that are imposed upon, and apparently welcome by, New York’s legislators, the far better answer is to make the jobs full time, pay them an appropriate salary as full-time legislators, and preclude outside income. 

This offers two monumental advantages that would eliminate New York’s perpetual legislative problems: First, it would mean that our legislators no longer have an excuse for their abject failure to stay in Albany and do their jobs timely and diligently.  Second, it would mean that legislators could no longer be bought and sold, regardless of whether they reveal who’s paying their bills.  In the scheme of what it costs to run the State of New York, the additional cost of making New York’s legislators full-time is trivial.

But it’s unlikely that our current legislators would go for such a change.  You see, they can make a whole lot more money selling influence than they can serving the People.  Weitz & Luxenberg pays better than the government, right Shelly?  If you want to see a real fight, just try to take away their outside jobs.  What does that tell you about the New York State Legislature?