Here’s a statistic you probably didn’t know before you started reading this column: Among Michigan’s 147 state legislators, four are married to registered lobbyists. That means in four households, one person works for the state to write the laws we all live by. The other person works to tell lawmakers what those policies should be.
None of the four represents part of Greater Lansing.
If this seems unusual, it’s because it is.
The oldtimers tell me that 25 years ago, the number of legislators married to lobbyists was zero.
There’s no way to know for sure because the law didn’t require lawmakers to disclose certain personal information on a form every year. It does now.
Along with their assets and side income, all state-level public officials must now check a “yes” or “no” box that follows the question, “Was your spouse a registered lobbyist in the State of Michigan during the reporting period?”
We shouldn’t be naive. Relations between legislators and staff, legislators and lobbyists, and legislators and other legislators aren’t new.
People are people after all. Grown adults will be with whomever they want.
It would also be foolish not to acknowledge that husbands and wives have varying degrees of influence over their spouses. Whether they work for a special interest or not, spouses obviously share opinions.
The difference is that the relationships are formalized under the same roof.
As former Public Citizen’s Congress Watch director Frank Clemente once said, “How can a member of Congress possibly share a bed and a bank account with a member of a persuasion industry without a life laced by conflicts of interest?”
The conflict seemed obvious to former U.S. Rep. Joe Schwarz when I mentioned the subject to him.
“Having a spouse who’s a lobbyist from the same state and same jurisdiction is not very smart, bordering on dumb,” he told me. “You’re opening yourself up to inquiries and suspicions. But I suppose this is a different era. This is not something I can imagine happening in my generation.”
The rules are different. Public officials are bolder in testing the unwritten rules of the game. A few terms ago, former Rep. Rebekah Warren worked for National Popular Vote to lobby lawmakers in other states, for example.
A Washington University Journal of Law and Policy report called lawmakers marrying lobbyists a “blossoming phenomenon.”
It’s something public officials in Michigan have obviously considered. They included the are-you-married-to-a-lobbyist question on the new public disclosure statements, after all.
They had to. Outside of that question on a form, there are no laws or rules governing the union.
We can’t tell two adults they can’t marry. Under Michigan’s lobbying law, legislators married to lobbyists don’t report the gifts or meals they exchange with each other. That’s not realistic or enforceable.
House rules allow members to abstain from voting on bills or amendments due to conflicts of interest, but the rules leave it up to the lawmakers to determine what those might be.
Other legislators, the press, staff, really anybody could tell a lawmaker that voting on a particular bill is a conflict of interest. Still, nothing legally compels that lawmaker to withhold a vote.
Ultimately, the only people who can hold our legislators accountable for conflicts of interest, such as marrying a paid advocate, are voters.
(Kyle Melinn is the editor of the Capitol news service MIRS. You can email him at melinnky@gmail.com.)
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