The Media, Malloy And The Consolidation Of State Agencies

The very title of the story in CTMirror was ominous: “Howls as Malloy tries to shorten leash on watchdogs.”

And in the lede paragraph, a dark joweled Richard Nixon is resurrected from his bed of infamy: “Governor Dannel Malloy is attempting the most dramatic makeover of the state's watchdog agencies since their creation as post-Watergate reforms in the 1970s.”

Watergate redivivus!

The media knows how to raise the roof when its much vaunted independence is threatened. And somewhere in the background a corrupt ex-felon is rolling around in the muck: “But critics wonder why Malloy, a Democrat, is inviting a political backlash with his second move on the watchdogs, whose independence the General Assembly defended when a Republican governor, John G. Rowland, tried to weaken them a decade ago.”

Rowland too? This is serious.

The three putatively “independent” agencies Mr. Malloy is attempting to consolidate under a brand new agency, the Office of Government Accountability or OGA, are the State Elections Enforcement Commission (SEEC), the Office of State Ethics (OSE), and the Freedom of Information Commission (FOIC)

In his new budget, Mr. Malloy has called for the elimination of a Corrupticut era provision that shielded the three watchdog agencies from budget cuts by compelling the governor to transmit his unrevised budget requests to the watchdog solicitous General Assembly.

Once the provision is eliminated, critics suppose the governor’s office will be able to control the three agencies' purse strings, thus bringing them to heel whenever the FOIC orders an administrative agency to release to the media public data that might bring a blush to the cheek of some Malloy factotum, or the SEEC uncovers political thuggery in one or another of the state’s urban one-party corruption pots, or the OSE finds that this or that agency is in violation of some inscrutable ethical rule as ambiguous as the Oracle at Delphi.

The OSE recently destroyed a quarter-century's worth of public records detailing the finances of present and former public officials because, said executive director Carol Carson, the agency prior to her arrival had “suffered through well-publicized internal problems” and its records were in disarray. In fact, the operations of the agency were also in disarray. On at least one occasion, the OSE disposed of a case when it lacked a proper quorum to adjudicate, an oversight compliant courts are almost certain to wink at.

Under the old dispensation, the investigative and legal staffs of the oversight agencies are superintended by agency heads answerable to independent citizen commissions that adjudicate elections, ethics and Freedom of Information complaints. Under the Malloy regime, the executive director of the new Office of Government Accountability, appointed by the governor, would be vested with the authority to assign and/or discipline lawyers whose duties might include the investigation of the governor. That reorganization would pretty much turn supposed independent agencies into the governor’s liege lords, subject always to executive whimsy.

Soon after Victims Advocate Michelle Cruz pointed to failings in an Earned Risk Reduction Credits program fashioned by undersecretary for criminal justice policy Michael Lawlor – one of the violent criminals given credits under Mr. Lawlor’s program celebrated his early release by murdering a store clerk in Meriden – her job was posted and she was quickly replaced by a Cook County, Illinois political operative.

This is not a governor who lies down quietly under the lash of media criticism. And critics of his “independent” agency consolidations abound. President of the Connecticut Council on Freedom of Information James Smith quickly jumped into the flames.

"These proposals, said Mr. Smith, “can only be explained as an effort to gain control over the guarantors of transparency and integrity in government. We ask why the Malloy administration is determined to emasculate the independent watchdogs?"

Vice President of Common Cause Karen Flynn was flummoxed. “It's perplexing," said she. "His recommendations save no money, but they take away the independence of the watchdogs," a chord strummed also by House Minority Leader Lawrence Cafero: “There's (sic) only two reasons in my opinion. One is you are trying to save money. That's clearly not the case. The other is control and power. It has to be the latter."

Since Mr. Cafero has recently expressed interest in running for governor, it will be easy for Malloyalist operatives to dismiss his ruminations as political posturing, even when they are reasonable.

As the independence of the three watchdog agencies are drawn within the orbit of powerful politicians, the real losers will be the crowd of petitioners, not always news agencies, gathered near the foot of the throne begging a more powerful and compromised government for simple justice.

The Campaign Finance Reform Flip… Flop… Flip…

Someone – no one is certain who did it – dismembered the non-partisan State Elections Enforcement Commission (SEEC), and the heart and liver of the thing ended up in the Secretary of State’s office.

The elections commission is supposed to prevent the kind of hanky panky that is the life and blood of machine party politics. The need for such a committee was felt after former Governor John Rowland, now a respected radio commentator and member of the fourth estate, was packed off to jail for having “deprived the state of honest services.”

Governor Dannel Malloy, the titular head of the dominant Democratic Party machine in Connecticut, has combined some agencies, supposedly as a cost saving measure, and that is how the body parts of the SEEC came to be parceled out to various agencies. This dismemberment, the leftist watchdog group Common Cause says, has considerably emasculated the hound of fair elections heaven.

The relevant watchdog agencies during the late mid-term elections nodded assent to a measure adopted by the Democratic controlled General Assembly that dumped millions of dollars into the campaign coffers of then gubernatorial candidate Dan Malloy – and just in time too, because the Democratic hopeful was in danger of being outspent by his Republican opponent, Tom Foley. So, when the high court ruled unconstitutional that portion of the nation’s complex campaign finance law that automatically would have would have supplied Mr. Malloy with tax generated funds to equalize money prospectively “spent” by Mr. Foley, Democrats in Connecticut’s General Assembly wrote a bill awarding to Mr. Malloy additional tax funds to redress the imbalance, thus depriving the state of the honest services of Mr. Foley, who lost to Mr. Malloy by the slenderest of margins. Money, as we had been told countless times by fair election folk, mattered.

It’s all very complicated. Legislation that attempts to square circles generally becomes so Byzantine that only seasoned politicians can understand it, the better to manipulate complex laws to their advantage. As laws and political processes become increasingly complicated, the violations of those laws, now subject to nuanced interpretation, tend to disappear in the maze of complexity. This is what has happened to national campaign finance regulation and its derivative permutations in the states. Confusingly complex laws, adrenaline to lawyers, are the enemy both of the good and the perfect.

In any case, the non-partisan superintending state agency commissioned to enforce campaign finance laws – portions of which some jurists have declared unconstitutional -- had been dismembered, a casualty of the pinched times in which we live. Under Mr. Malloy’s cost savings hatchet, the Freedom of Information Commission has met a similar fate.

Over on the left, an alarm was raised by Common Cause. The Malloy reforms of watchdog agencies, the left breathlessly warned, had seemingly removed the fox from the henhouse; but, in practice, Mr. Malloy’s economies, made necessary by shrinking resources, had put the hens directly in the mouths of the foxes. The Secretary of State office was to superintend the SEEC.

Late on Sunday, one of the wiser heads in the Democratic caucus may have asked: How can a partisan political office, the Secretary of State, be expected to rule in a non-partisan manner on questions involving campaign finance getting and spending? Called upon to decide a question of campaign funding that would either enrich or impoverish Democrats, how would the question have been decided by former Secretary of State Susan Bysiewicz, an intensely partisan politician now running for Sen. Joe Lieberman’s seat in the U.S. Congress? Can the fox really be trusted not to close his mouth on the hen that reform has fortuitously put in his teeth?

Reason struck like lighting late on Sunday and, at the last minute, Democrats in the legislature and Mr. Malloy decided to leave well enough alone and retain the independence of the SEEC. It will remain a self standing, independent agency.

As an amusing sidebar to this issue, it may be noted that when longtime reporter Mark Pazniokas set out toward the Capitol, lance in hand, determined to find out who wrote the silly pro-fox bill, he returned empty handed to CTMirror after having tilted with all the relevant windmills, his lance shattered: For some inexplicable reason, no one he interviewed in the Malloy administration or in the Democratic dominated legislature could tell him who wrote that portion of the bill that placed hen in the fox’s teeth.