Governor Rick Snyder thinks the state of Michigan has some unfinished business. In his Jan. 18 State of the State address, Snyder (pictured, right) told the legislature that 2011 was a good year for the state, but said 2012 should be dedicated to “really making this year about good government.”

 “It’s not about ‘big government’ or ‘small government,’” Snyder said. “It’s about good government, government doing the right thing for the right reasons, and giving you, our citizens, great customer service.”

Without going into great detail, Snyder laid out a plan to reform state laws on lobbying, campaign finance and ethics regulations.  A statement calling for “more frequent and better disclosure of campaign contributions” and greater scrutiny of state contracting resulted in sustained applause from almost the entire legislature. And apparently, just after they stopped clapping, Democratic legislators took out their pens.

Earlier this month, the Democratic caucus announced an ambitious plan to overhaul state ethics and campaign finance laws. In total, the package includes 16 separate bills and one constitutional amendment which cover a range of issues, including lobbying, financial disclosure of elected officials, and increased transparency in campaign advertising.

Several pieces of the proposal had previously made it through the state House of Representatives with bipartisan support only to die in the senate, said State  Representative Kate Segal. According to Segal (pictured, right) Snyder’s pronouncements at the State of the State helped inspire renewed attempts at reform.

“We’re hoping to have the governor’s support in pushing this forward,” Segal said. “It is long overdue for the state of Michigan.”

Segal blames the legislature’s continued inactivity on the sheer number of bills. The 16 bills will progress one at a time, and Segal said the Democratic caucus is willing to work with their Republican colleagues “to make them stronger.”

One bill would force greater transparency in “robo-calls,” the commonly employed tool that keeps potential voters’ phones buzzing with automated messages in the days before a referendum or an election. Under the proposed reform, a robo-call message would need to state the name of the organization that funded the call.

The proposed constitutional amendment, included with the bills in the reform package, would increase lobbying and political donation disclosure of corporations, and ban the awarding of $100,000-plus contracts to vendors which have made political donations.  While more demanding than simply changing a law – a constitutional amendment requires passage by a two-thirds majority of the House and Senate and ratification by Michigan voters – Segal said the change is a way to restrict the influence of the “millions and now billions being spent in our elections.”

“I have constituents say to me, ‘How am I going to make a difference without that kind of money?’” Segal said. “I think what these bills do, they say, yes there’s money in elections, but they allow constituents to find out where the money is coming from.”

In 2011, the Georgia Government Transparency and Campaign Finance Commission assessed $7 million worth of fines for campaign finance violations. But because the commission, formerly known as the Georgia State Ethics Commission, couldn’t afford to send out notices by certified mail, fines against politicians, officials, and parties were cut to a total of around $1 million.

The inability of the commission to pay for a service essential to its duties is, to Georgia Senator Doug Stoner (D-Smyrna), indicative of a larger issue. The disgust was obvious in Stoner’s voice as he explained how the state of Georgia gave up $6 million in revenue. “The fact that the ethics commission could not send out certified mail should tell you that we have a problem,” Stoner said.

In response, Stoner is proposing an overhaul package that would mean a dramatic upgrade in how the state polices its political spending.

Under Stoner’s plan a new ethics commission would be created, one that operates independent of the executive branch – which currently arranges the commission’s makeup through the governor’s appointments – and the legislature, which sets its budget. One bill would give the state’s supreme and appellate courts the power to select commissioners; a companion bill would guarantee steady funding for the commission.

The commission’s budget, like those of other state agencies, has faced dramatic cuts in recent years. But Stoner says the cuts have been too deep, and can create the appearance of impropriety, pointing out the recent coincidence of a large cut levied at the same time the commission investigated a past speaker of the house.

Stoner (pictured, right) says there’s no proof that budget cuts have been targeted to protect individual lawmakers. “But it doesn’t really matter,” he said. “The public perception is that that’s what happened.”

The commission currently operates on an annual budget of about $1 million, a nearly 50 percent decrease from its highest level. Stoner’s bill would guarantee the commission a funding level of 0.01 percent of the state’s total expenditure — which would grant the ethics board $1.4 million a under the current budget — and make its funding invulnerable to the legislature’s impulses.

“Does it make sense for us to be overseeing this — our own ethics?” Stoner asked rhetorically. “In that sense, it’s vulnerable to us cutting the budget at whim.”

Stoner’s bill will first need to make it through the Senate committee process, at which point it will move on to the House of Representatives. Stoner thinks it’s obvious that Georgia needs an independent, fully funded ethics commission, and issued a preemptive challenge to the bills’ opponents.  

“Anyone that’s saying we shouldn’t do it,” Stoner said, “to me, they’re going to have a hard time explaining to the public why we’re not.”

Bill Richardson had an admirable career as a member of the United States House of Representatives and an ambassador to the United Nations, where he was one of the country’s most capable negotiators in complex and sometimes dangerous international situations. Unfortunately, the ex-governor of New Mexico’s accomplishments have been undermined by his questionable dealings with campaign financing in previous years, and a new investigation has made Richardson the focus of inquiry once again.

On Thursday, news broke that Richardson (pictured, right) was being investigated for the use of campaign contributions to buy the silence of a woman with whom he’d allegedly had an affair. The woman, who reportedly worked for the state of the New Mexico during Richardson’s time as governor and during his 2008 presidential run, is said to have received $250,000 from Richardson’s presidential campaign funds, which was meant to prevent her from suing her former lover and employer.

Richardson’s scandal, first reported in the Wall Street Journal, is likened to that of another one-time Democratic presidential candidate, John Edwards , who will soon face trial for violating campaign finance laws related to his own mistress. But the New Mexican politician has already been tarnished by an earlier, serious, if less sexy, scandal related to money and power.

Richardson’s sudden fall from grace in January 2009 was largely obscured by the run-up to Barack Obama’s inauguration as president. Obama had asked Richardson, then the sitting New Mexico governor, to take the important cabinet position of Commerce Secretary. But, mere weeks before his appointment, a lingering ethical problem from Richardson’s past caught up to him. 

Richardson’s trouble, which caused him to withdraw from consideration for a job in Obama’s cabinet, was related to an accusation of pay-to-play politicking during his 2006 gubernatorial reelection campaign. According to the Los Angeles Times, New Mexico entered into a lucrative contract with a firm called CDR Financial Products not long after the company and its president, David Rubin, had given upwards of $100,000 to Richardson’s campaign and two of Richardson’s political action committees.

New Mexico’s contract with CDR Financial called upon the investment firm to package a $1.6 billion bond deal involving construction projects for the state’s highways and transportation. For its work on the project, CDR Financial collected $1.5 million from the state.

According to the National Institute on Money in State Politics (NIMSP), Rubin (pictured, right) and his company were no strangers to cozying up to state-level politicians. Data from the NIMSP revealed that CDR and its president had contributed $102,000 to governors or gubernatorial candidates, including $35,000 to former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell. Proving that they were spreading money in the West, Northeast and South, Rubin and CDR also contributed a total of $5,000 each to a candidate for Tennesse governor and a candidate for the Tennessee House Senate  Democratic Caucus; another $10,000 was parceled out to 17 Tennessee legislative candidates.

Richardson and Rubin — who said he simply supported “liberal, inclusive” candidates — both denied any accusations of pay-to-play, but the appearance of influence peddling was enough to force Richardson out of national service.  Federal prosecutors later decided not to bring criminal charges against Richardson. (Rubin hasn’t been so lucky: He and two other CDR executives were later indicted, and are now facing trial for defrauding government agencies in a “bid-rigging” scheme which allegedly involved kickbacks to CDR.)

But the scandal was enough to force real change within the state of New Mexico. During the 2009 legislature, lawmakers tightened the state’s existing campaign finance laws, becoming the 46th American state to enact limits on campaign contributions to individual candidates.

Before the bill could become law, it needed a signature from the man whose questionable financial dealings inspired the legislation, and has once again put him back in the spotlight: Bill Richardson.