The Finely Honed Art of Loving a Bill to Death

Of all the dirty tricks I’ve seen played by legislators, my favorite is the old game of loving a bill to death.

I’ve written about this before. Lawmakers are confronted with a worthwhile and popular bill they and a few key supporters hate. But they know that outright murder wouldn’t sit well with their constituents. So they loudly proclaim their support for the concept behind the legislation--and then set about “strengthening” it. By the time they’re done, the measure has been loaded down with so many confusing “strengthening” and “clarifying” amendments that defeat is assured.

The game has never been played better than it was Wednesday morning in a small second-floor hearing room in Los Angeles City Hall. There, with a claque of lobbyists smiling in approval, the City Council Rules and Elections Committee covered a proposed lobbyist control ordinance with so much love that it’s ready for burial.

City Hall’s most skilled ordinance assassin, council President John Ferraro, acting as committee chairman, was in charge. Ferraro doesn’t do the killing himself. But he orchestrates it, always careful to protect himself with an alibi.

He left the dirty work to the committee members on either side of him, the council’s two smartest and craftiest members, Richard Alatorre and Zev Yaroslavsky.

Seated across from the deadly trio were the victims, Benjamin Bycel, director of the City Ethics Commission, and Ethics Commissioner Edwin O. Guthman, a USC journalism professor and a retired newspaper editor. The Ethics Commission, created by the voters to bring at least a measure of cleanliness to City Hall, presented the lobby control law to the council last June and has been waiting for a decision ever since.

The commission’s proposal is not revolutionary. It would require lobbyists and the firms that hire them to report their income and clients to city regulators. Now, only individual lobbyists must file such reports. Most important, the measure would require attorneys to comply with the disclosure requirements when they’re lobbying at City Hall.

This is opposed by some attorneys who represent land developers and other businesses regulated by the city. Although these lawyers earn much of their living by soliciting support from council members and other city officials, they insist their activities are not lobbying. The leader of this group is attorney-lobbyist Arthur K. Snyder, a former councilman. If he’s not the secret mastermind of the plot to murder the lobby control law, he at least deserves a place as a key accomplice.

Alatorre struck the first blow. He said the city needs a lobbyist ordinance. “But, I have serious doubts about the ordinance we have before us today,” he said. He said he wanted “something legally defensible and that does not go beyond what we must accomplish.”

He said he had several questions--15 of them, in fact. With less than half an hour left in the hearing, he didn’t see how there’d be time for him to get an answer that day. Ferraro nodded in agreement.

When a lawmaker suddenly comes up with a bunch of last-minute questions, you know something is fishy.

What happened in this case is that the council members had their eyes opened to the supposed dangers of the lobbyist control measure by a 19-page memo written by attorneys at the prestigious downtown law firm of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. Gibson Dunn attorney Wayne Smith told reporter Susan Seager of the Los Angeles Daily Journal that he and associate Dan S. Floyd wrote the memo for the “Advocates Bar,” a group formed by Snyder.

When it was Yaroslavsky’s turn, he said in some places the law goes too far. In others, it’s not strong enough. He proposed extending the law to city departments not covered by the proposal, including the city attorney’s office and, possibly, the transportation and planning departments.

Obviously, this would have plunged the deliberations into deep complexity, which could occupy months. Delay into infinity is a goal of loving a bill to death.

Ethics Commission Director Bycel and Commissioner Guthman tried to fight back. They pointed out that the measure had been before the council for a long time. Bycel objected to the last-minute Snyder memo.

Yaroslavsky wasn’t interested. “There are some aspects of this that I know more about than you or Mr. Guthman,” Yaroslavsky told Bycel.

Soon it was 10 a.m., time to adjourn. There was enough life left in Bycel for him to know what had happened. “We are whipped around if we are too strong and we are whipped around if we are too soft,” he said.

Ferraro gaveled the meeting to a close with the satisfied look of a man who’d accomplished a good day’s work. The claque of lobbyists looked pleased as they left the room.