‘Star-Telegram’ editorial praises online lawmakers’ disclosure forms

By Jennifer Peebles | Monday, December 1st, 2008

We’re awfully grateful for the shout out from the editorial board at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, which this morning had an unsigned editorial on our project to post online the personal financial disclosure forms of all of Texas’ state legislators:

The forms are an important resource for detecting potential conflicts of interest because legislators must list, for themselves and their spouses, such financial interests as income sources; holdings in stocks, bonds, mutual funds and property; ties to lobbyists; and gifts …

Our only complaint is that, even though the records are public, private groups have to ease the public access.

Amen. We’re glad people have come to our site to look at the forms, but ideally, they shouldn’t have to. The state should make the forms available online itself.

The problem is with state law. The law requires lawmakers to fill out the form, which are public record, but the law also requires the state Ethics Commission to record the identity of the people who look at each form.

As I was quoted saying in a recent story by the Star-Telegram, that’s an intimidation tactic. Truth be known, many political folks don’t want people seeing these forms, and legislators know they can scare off a great number of potential form-viewers by demanding that their names be taken down.

(Notice the forms in question pertain to legislators’ own finances. And legislators themselves make the laws about the disclosure forms and those forms’ availability. Isn’t that kind of a conflict of interest in and of itself — the fox guarding the henhouse?)

One other note on the Star-Tel editorial today. It closes with this:

But, of course, we aren’t satisfied — ideally those reports should be searchable by donor so the public can readily see who are the largest contributors to a candidate.

More on that idea later.

Absolutely. They should be searchable, and that’s been on our to-do list since we first posted the PDFs. Note that the Center for Responsive Politics — the people who run OpenSecrets.org — have input the text of the disclosure forms of all 535 members of Congress to make them searchable by the public. We’d love to see a similar database for Texas lawmakers’ disclosure forms, and we’re working on it.

Meanwhile, if you have ideas about what other public records you’d like to see searchable online, drop me a note. I’m jennifer@texaswatchdog.org.

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