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Common Sense

The Immovable Non-movers

You can’t suspend the law of gravity. Nor, apparently, the laws of bureaucratic lethargy and inertia.

Diana Rickert was a policy analyst with the Illinois Policy Institute who accepted a job with the administration of Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner.

She lasted six weeks.

The assignment: combine and streamline several governmental departments. After years of “railing against government,” she felt she must accept this opportunity to improve government from the inside. Or else forever wonder whether she might have made a difference.

She’s learned her answer. She could not. Not as an insider. Not without the authority, at a minimum, to fire useless employees, who abound in Illinois’s state government. 

And whose uselessness doesn’t always preclude outrageous expectations about salary and position.

Whether trying to get working computers or to get workers to work on simple but unfamiliar tasks, Diana and the few others eager to get stuff done were constantly thwarted by the apathy and sense of entitlement of the majority — and by endless arcane and senseless rules. Rather than imply tacit acceptance of such a broken, unfixable system, she resigned.

All this sounds familiar, an inevitable feature of government bureaucracy with its glued-​in vested interests and lack of market-​style profit incentives. Old news if you’ve ever been to the DMV. 

So what’s the answer? Give up?

No. Illinois is “ready for change,” Diana Rickert says. But it’s outsiders who will have to change it — from the outside … “because the insiders never will.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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Accountability general freedom insider corruption local leaders moral hazard national politics & policies too much government U.S. Constitution

Separation of Senators

The separation of powers doctrine has been a bedrock principle of small‑r republican government. Each branch — legislative, executive, judicial — should be independent, and check the power of the other branches.

This requires that no person hold positions simultaneously in more than one branch of government. 

Which brings us to Nevada State Senator Heidi Gansert. In addition to being a legislator, she’s currently employed by the University of Nevada-​Reno as executive director for external relations … an executive branch position.

One can certainly understand why she wants to keep her prestigious legislative perch, while maintaining her annual $203,000 from the university. But those pesky folks at the Nevada Policy Research Institute’s Center for Justice and Constitutional Litigation insist Gansert adhere to the constitution. 

They’ve filed a lawsuit.

As if to dramatize why “separation of powers” matters, consider Senate Bill 358, which sought to reform civil asset forfeiture in Nevada. The legislation couldn’t get out of the Senate Judiciary Committee, where State Senator Nicole Cannizzaro is vice-​chair. She also holds a $99,000 position as a Clark County deputy district attorney.

Senator Cannizzaro’s presence on the Senate Judiciary Committee, as it pertains to forfeiture legislation, begs for a lesson on separation of powers,” the Nevada Policy Research Institute’s Daniel Honchariw wrote in the Las Vegas Review-​Journal.

“Reform would’ve meant less money for district attorneys,” Honchariw explained, “which, in addition to police departments, directly profit from forfeitures.”

Nevada’s legal precedent on separation of powers is less clear-​cut regarding Cannizzaro’s conflicting role in local government, than for Gansert’s state position. But the potential for mischief is the same — and obvious.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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