It’s good to see that, more than a year after I first wrote about the issue, the increasing dependence on vague concept draft is finally getting some attention.

While there may be a few limited circumstances under which concept drafts are legitimate, it’s long past time to severely curtail their use. The presiding officers of the Legislature, Senate President Troy Jackson and Speaker of the House Rachel Talbot Ross, clearly have no interest in taking that action, or they would have already.

That shouldn’t come as any surprise: It’s convenient for members of leadership to be able to float proposals at the last possible minute with little, if any, public scrutiny, and concept drafts are an ideal way to do that. While Maine may do a good job with government transparency generally, especially compared to other states and the federal government, it’s important that we remain vigilant and resist backsliding. It’s also important that we continue to work to improve transparency at all levels of our government.

If we are to grant that concept drafts do have a certain, limited, validity – a position I don’t really agree with – it would be easy enough to scale back their use.

One way would be to introduce a rule with a hard cap on their number, perhaps limiting the number of concept drafts by committee each session. Since there are currently around 20 joint standing committees, if we picked a reasonable number – say, four – it would dramatically reduce the number of concept drafts to around 80 a session, fewer than one-third of those introduced last session. We can quibble over the number, but four seems like a good starting point; it would give the House and Senate caucuses from each party on each committee one each. The far better solution would be to bar them by default and only allow them at all with unanimous, bipartisan approval from the Legislative Council, but that’s probably a step too far.

As I’ve said in the past, and others have pointed out lately, another pernicious practice in Augusta that evades transparency is the use of private partisan caucuses to discuss legislation. This was highlighted recently when Democrats met privately with a federal official to discuss legislation addressing gun safety. While the parties said the meeting was no more than a summary of existing regulations, that explanation doesn’t make much sense.

For one, they shouldn’t have needed an in-person briefing from a federal official for that information, which should be readily available to any member of the public in writing. They should have been able to have their own staff simply do the research and present the information to them, or they could have contacted a member of our congressional delegation to get the information. Now, it may well have been valuable to have a Q&A session with an official about the laws and regulations and how they’re enforced, but if that’s what took place, the purpose of the meeting was to do more than summarize regulations.

Moreover, it’s incredibly inappropriate that a federal official of any type would have requested a private meeting with state legislators on any issue. There’s simply no need for it. The only times state legislators should need to shield their discussions from the public are when they involve a personnel matter; otherwise, the public ought to be able to listen to their discussions. Federal officials have that exemption as well, and exemptions apply to things like sensitive national security issues and otherwise classified intelligence. A discussion about federal gun laws and regulations shouldn’t have involved either of those things and should have been handled in public. Republicans were right to decline the private briefing and to draw attention to it.

These private partisan caucuses are, for the most part, entirely unnecessary – just like concept drafts. It’s one thing if legislators are discussing political strategy on nongovernmental property or virtually; it’s understandable that those discussions aren’t open to the public.

When they’re doing their job legislating, though, everyday citizens who voted for them and pay their salaries ought to be able to hear every word they say and have all the same information. Just as it’s the Legislature’s job to oversee the executive branch, it’s our jobs as citizens to oversee the Legislature – and we can’t do that when they lock the doors. A key part of democracy is transparency. When government officials evade that, it’s natural to be suspicious.

Jim Fossel, a conservative activist from Gardiner, worked for Sen. Susan Collins. He can be contacted at:
jwfossel@gmail.com
Twitter: @jimfossel

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