When I lived in Newton, this was the kind of thing that made me love being represented by Senator Creem. This April, she filed a bill that would require disclosure 6 months prior to an election and every month thereafter- keeping legislature requirements in line with that for local and statewide offices. Beacon Hill being Beacon Hill, it has not been passed this session, despite Creem’s dogged advocacy.
So where most officials would shrug, say “I tried,” and give up, Creem refuses to quit. Faced with a primary challenge of her own this September, Creem decided to live up to her own legislation.
This is why I enjoyed being represented by Creem and why I can’t recommend her enough over her opponent in the upcoming Democratic Primary. Creem talks the talk and walks the walk. She has a true commitment to reform and deserves to go back to the cesspool on Beacon Hill to clean it up.
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p>Above is the info per the Senate website realive to Sen Creem and the Committee on the Judiciary, a committee she Chairs. Manning made the point that she has a conflict of interest given the fact that she practices law in the area of divorce. The above definition of the committee’s duties makes it hard to imagine that her role representing clients in the courts is not in conflict with her duties on the referenced committee. Certainly her want to change campaign reporting rules is admirable, but the conflict that Manning disclosed is pretty hard to ignore.
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p>Full disclosure..Not a huge Manning fan.
http://vps28478.inmotionhosting.com/~bluema24/d…
!2 years in office and she’s never felt the need to do this. But this year she is being challenged and so she wants to increase the reporting requirements.
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p>This is an ‘anti-challenger’ bill.
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p>Charles Rudnick has criticized her and other incumbent legislators for accepting lots of money from PACs and lobbyists. Creem would like to force challengers like Rudnick to report more often so that she can go through his reports and criticize his donors back.
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p>Creem main constituency is not the people of brookline – but attorneys across the state. And you can see that in her campaign finance reports which are made up of about 40% attorneys.
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p>Greater disclosure is a good thing. Proposing it right before an election is a cynical and self serving move.
I don’t see this as cynical. I think Senator Creem is more than happy to feather her progressive and good government credentials, but so what? If the bill is good for small-d democracy (and I believe it is), then I’m glad she’s doing it. If it really takes a primary challenge to get good progressive legislation, then we ought to work on having more primary challenges, no?
… would be bringing back the clean elections law that they killed on a voice vote.
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p>All legislators when you ask them will tell you they supported clean elections. But they killed it on a voice vote so we would not know which of them sold out the will of the people.
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p>These reporting requirement half measures are insulting to a public that has spoken clearly to the legislature in a ballot initiative that we want public financing of campaigns.
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p>There are 1000 ways to get around the reporting no matter what we do. Money flows like water – in large amounts – and through the smallest cracks. So we have straw donors, or money that is given through charitable institutions, or through non-reportable business deals ( maybe I sell you some land at half price, maybe I hire your cousin ). Nothing will stop this abuse like simply taking the money out of politics with public campaign finance reform.
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p>But thousands of insiders with vested interests in the decades of graft it took to build up their little empires will stop at nothing to make sure that real campaign finance reform will never come – unless we force it on them.
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p>And goofy little reporting scheme like this don’t solve the problem – not really.
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p>What Creem is really good at is filing bills that sound like reform but do nothing in reality.
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p>After the probation department patronage scandal broke a few weeks back she was quick with a ‘reform bill’ – that sounded tough – but carefully avoided making any meaningful changes.
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p>Even after her reform judges still can’t make probation hiring decisions and most importantly they can’t move the money the legislature earmarks for patronage – err I mean probation – and move it to other parts of the court budget. The legislature remain in complete control of patronage hiring at probation.
Bah. That’s your entire argument, and it’s not how I roll. Make it better. Use enforcement. Make it better still.
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p>Badmouthing Creem’s work to make things more transparent because of some other dislike of her or because of a voice vote Creem didn’t call for seems more than a bit silly to me.
…I don’t give much credibility to a poster who uses the motto “We dig up the dirt so you don’t have to”. Very Drudge-esque and basically screams professional cynic and proud of it. Like you, it’s not how I roll.
That being in the midst of a contested election has demonstrated to Creem how woefully minimal the reporting requirements are, and that’s why she filed this bill? Why do you you automatically assume the worst? You’re like some malignant Occam’s Razor.
Who has more stringent requirements – statewide, county? I’m missing part of the equation here.
and a lot of local ones. I can’t speak for every community but I know that in Cambridge, for example, local candidates had much more stringent reporting requirements.
A legislator who doesn’t just file bills but lives up to the spirit of them. I hope Creem shames the whole lot of them, including her opponent, into supporting her bill next session. Her opponent is supposed to be Mr. Reform… why wasn’t he out in front on this?
he said he’d release too… but nothing’s come out so far and I’ll believe it only when I see it.