Legislators learn to avoid making tough decisions

EDITORIAL: The state Assembly is using an old ploy to put off approval of a new open-records bill.

   One of the oldest tricks in the political book is a clever ploy known to its practitioners as CDA: Constructive Decision Avoidance. It goes something like this:
   Say you’re a member of the state Assembly. A very controversial measure comes before you — like, say, a bill that would open government records to public scrutiny. All the good-government groups are for it, of course, and the State House press corps is really pushing it, but a lot of powerful forces, including the state attorney general, the county prosecutors and numerous organizations representing victims of crimes, are lined up against it.
   You want to be on record in favor of the bill (primarily because you don’t want to have to explain to your constituents why you would vote against such an obviously well-intentioned and public-spirited measure). At the same time, you don’t want to anger the attorney general or any other elements of the well-organized law-and-order lobby.
   This is where CDA comes in. What you do is work out a deal with your counterparts in the state Senate. You’ll vote for the bill in the lower house with the understanding that a similar, but not identical bill will go to the upper house. After the Assembly bill has won unanimous approval, the Senate will hold hearings, take testimony, then post its own, rewritten version of the bill — which will also be approved unanimously.
   Now, you and every other member of both the Assembly and Senate are on record in favor of good government, but all this deliberation and parliamentary maneuvering has taken months and months. The Senate bill still has to go back to the Assembly, but wait — it’s time for the summer recess. All the legislators go home; Senate action on the bill is deferred until their return in the fall.
   But wait — it’s an election year. Every seat in the Legislature is up for grabs, along with the governorship, and the demands of campaigning make it difficult to schedule any substantive legislative sessions in September and October. So the bill languishes until the November election is over.
   Suddenly, it’s December — the lame-duck session — and a zillion emergency bills, resolutions and appropriations crowd the docket. Now, the doctrine of CDA administers the coup de grâce: It would be unseemly for the Assembly to take hasty action on the Senate version of such a complicated bill, which has undergone so many significant changes. Besides, there’s a new governor-elect, and it just wouldn’t be fair during the transition for the outgoing governor to sign a bill into law which the incoming governor might not wholeheartedly endorse.
   So the legislative session ends — and, with it, every bill not signed into law dies. The reform advocated by the good-government groups has been approved by unanimous votes in both houses of the Legislature, whose members have run for re-election touting their support for popular measures that protect the rights of ordinary citizens against big bad bureaucrats and special interests. Yet the law remains unchanged — much to the delight of the attorney general, the prosecutors and all those victims-rights groups.
   That, in a nutshell, is CDA — a practice the New Jersey Legislature has honed into an art form. Last June, landmark legislation to overhaul the state’s 1963 Right to Know Law, widely regarded as the weakest and most secretive government-records law in the nation, passed the state Assembly by a vote of 61-0. Last month, after nearly a year of negotiations, a different version passed the state Senate by a vote of 37-0. The bill could have gone directly to the floor of the Assembly for a vote. Instead, it was referred to the Assembly Judiciary Committee, which is not expected to meet again, much less take any action on bills, until the fall.
   Does anyone else see a CDA pattern here? We do. And we would strongly recommend another form of CDA — Citizens Demand Action — as a timely antidote to this decidedly cynical and undemocratic practice.