As state Rep. Mark Strama, D-Austin, detailed his objections to House Bill 5 on Tuesday, what he did not mention is that whether students enroll in challenging courses and the number of state exams they must take could affect his livelihood.
Bidness As Usual
With a conflict disclosure system rife with holes, virtually toothless ethics laws often left to the interpretation of the lawmakers they are supposed to regulate, and a Legislature historically unwilling to make itself more transparent, Texans know exceedingly little about who or what influences the people elected to represent them. And they have no way to differentiate between lawmakers motivated entirely by the interests of their constituents and those in it for their own enrichment.
The Texas Tribune’s Bidness As Usual Project — an extensive reporting and data venture that spanned the 2013 legislative session — looked at these lawmakers and the ethics rules that govern them, addressing issues like conflicts of interest and breaches in public accountability.
In addition to dozens of stories analyzing everything from individual lawmakers’ personal interests to the state’s disclosure forms and ethics laws, the project included the Texas Tribune Ethics Explorer.
This interactive tool was designed to educate citizens on the degree to which legislators’ personal interests conflicted with the public interest when passing bills and setting policy. It included extensive research into all 180 members of the Texas Legislature, plus the governor and lieutenant governor, and provided details on a lawmaker’s employment history and financial records, stock holdings, property listings, campaign finance data and ethics investigations. The Explorer was created with the generous support of the Fund for Investigative Journalism.
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Bidness As Usual
Transparency Bills Draw Strange Bedfellows
This session’s effort to make state government more transparent and ethical — spearheaded by some of the Legislature’s most conservative members and its most liberal ones — has attracted the strangest of bedfellows.
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Bidness As Usual
Judicial Donations Raise Questions of Partiality
Texas Supreme Court justices are elected by voters, and the campaign contributions they receive from law firms with an interest in their decisions have caused some to worry that justice is for sale.
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Bidness As Usual
Visualization: The Lobbyist Revolving Door
Since relinquishing their seats in January, 11 former House members and one former state senator have registered as lobbyists with the Texas Ethics Commission — and several of them are working for clients in industries they regulated in the Legislature.
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Bidness As Usual
Freshman Lawmaker Gets a Lesson in Pack Behavior
The general rule is that new legislators are supposed to be seen and not heard — especially, as it turns out, when the subject is legislative ethics.
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Bidness As Usual
Charitable Donations, With Political Benefits
Charity fundraisers give lobbyists and political donors a way to show their support to officeholders during legislative sessions — when the law prohibits direct contributions.
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Bidness As Usual
Lawmakers Slam Disclosure Bill — and Rebuke Freshman Who Filed It
Rep. Giovanni Capriglione got a rude awakening in his transparency bill’s hearing before the House State Affairs Committee on Wednesday when members suggested his legislation was a political “vendetta.”
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Bidness As Usual
UT System Set to Bolster Disclosure Requirements
In an effort to prevent the perception of conflicts of interest, faculty in the University of Texas System could soon be subject to more robust public disclosure requirements than lawmakers and even university system regents.
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Bidness As Usual
Part-Time Legislature Can Create Financial Hardship
Texas’ founders wanted a part-time Legislature with no room for full-time politicians. But paltry state pay means today’s lawmakers must hold full-time jobs elsewhere — narrowing the ranks of likely officeholders to those who can afford to do it.
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Bidness As Usual
Pension Privacy Gets Attention of Legislators
Texas’ public pension systems — including the one state lawmakers pay into — have an airtight exemption from the landmark 1973 sunshine law that was designed to let taxpayers known how public money is being spent. But some lawmakers want to change that.