No decorating the budget tree for legislators

PACKET EDITORIAL, March 20

   It looks like the New Jersey Legislature won’t have its traditional Christmas-in-June celebration this year.
   Gov. Jon Corzine and legislative leaders have reportedly agreed that the annual rite of padding the state budget with last-minute appropriations — known popularly as "Christmas tree" items — is now a thing of the past. No longer will legislators be permitted to add money to the budget at the 11th hour, without any advance notice or public debate, in order to benefit some project back home or satisfy some friendly special-interest group.
   "The process is broken and needs to be reformed," the governor declared.
   He’s right, of course. Sneaking a bundle of pork-barrel bills into the budget while the public isn’t looking — or, for those who prefer the Yuletide metaphor, trimming the Christmas tree while the kids are upstairs sleeping — isn’t exactly what the Founding Fathers had in mind when they set about creating a participatory democracy. The legislative process — especially the appropriations process — is meant to be open and transparent, allowing broad public participation, discussion and debate before arriving at decisions that are in the public interest.
   So Gov. Corzine’s commitment, and the legislative leadership’s agreement, to make this year’s budget process entirely open and transparent, is welcome. But let’s not kid ourselves that this marks the end of special-interest pork-barrel lawmaking in Trenton. And let’s not delude ourselves that the governor, along with his fellow Democrats who make up the majority in both houses of the Legislature, deserve a hallelujah chorus for casting themselves as the grinches who stole the Christmas tree.
   The fact is, Democrats have been padding the budget with last-minute handouts for decades. So have Republicans. Every year, whichever party is in power decides in caucus who’s going to get what, and slips it into the budget in late June while nobody’s looking. Members of the minority party dutifully express righteous indignation over this practice (in which they themselves gleefully participated when they were in power), the press keenly reports the angry political back-and-forth (but not necessarily the details of those last-minute budget items), editorial writers fulminate about these unseemly goings-on — and, by the Fourth of July, everyone forgets about it and goes to watch fireworks of another sort.
   There is no reason to think things would have been any different this year were it not for one new wrinkle. Because one prominent state senator, Camden County Democrat Wayne Bryant, got caught with his hands in a pork barrel of his own construction (he allegedly got paid for a no-show job that was funded by a Christmas tree grant he authored), this whole process has now become the target of a federal investigation. The U.S. attorney for New Jersey has issued subpoenas, and lawmakers are scrambling to prove that all the beneficiaries of their generosity earned it on their merits, rather than as a reward for their political or financial support.
   We’d be surprised if the investigation leads to any smoking guns. The quid-pro-quo understandings between legislators and those who support them and/or enjoy their beneficence tend to be implicit, not explicit. And because the lawmakers who are trimming the Christmas tree know they’ll be accused by the minority party of profligate pork-barrel spending, they’re always careful to lay out a plausible argument for supporting their favorite causes.
   But at least now they’ll have to do it in public, as part of the regular budget and appropriations process. That in itself is a major step toward reform. What remains to be seen is whether this reform has a life expectancy that’s longer than the attention span of the U.S. attorney.