Majority of Michigan House co-sponsors bipartisan financial disclosure legislation

Eager to do something about the state’s F grade for integrity, on Tuesday a group of more than 60 of the state House’s 110 members introduced bills requiring Michigan’s elected officials to publicly disclose their finances. The eight-bill package would require financial disclosures from state representatives and senators; candidates for the state House and Senate; candidates for the state’s executive offices; candidates for judicial offices; individuals serving on and candidates for governing boards; and individuals on and candidates for the state board of education.

Michigan is currently one of only two states in the country that don’t require elected officials to make such disclosures. This is a particular problem in the Great Lakes State because shorter term limits there mean that elected representatives, particularly in the state Legislature, frequently maintain their private business interests during their public service.

Democratic state Rep. David LaGrand told Daily Kos that last year the same package of bills “sort of died without a trace.”

According to a 2018 report by the Center for Public Integrity, it hasn’t been unusual for the state’s legislators to vote on bills that might affect their own or a family member’s bottom line, even in the rare cases where they disclosed a potential conflict. A 2018 bill that would have made it a felony for representatives to vote on bills that could affect their finances also died in committee. Given the uphill climb the bills seemed to face, what changed to allow the package to make such a splash this year?

Republican state Rep. Mark Huizenga, another of the package’s co-authors, chalked the progress up to “a different environment, in the sense that we've got a lot of new freshmen involved.” One out of five state House incumbents was term-limited out in 2018.

According to LaGrand, this year’s success is “more a matter of the idea having been discussed and in Lansing for some time.” LaGrand added that he started talking about disclosure with freshman House colleagues “before they got elected, so they came into the Legislature already partway into the conversation.”

Legislators have also been practicing. In 2017, 15 legislators, including LaGrand, filed voluntary disclosures with the Center for Public Integrity. Michigan’s newly elected executive branch has also been taking the lead.

from Daily Kos http://bit.ly/2JEwm2q