Icon (Close Menu)

Logout

For: Ethics, the Good Kind (Editorial)

2 min read

THIS IS AN OPINION

We'd also like to hear yours.
Tweet us @ArkBusiness or email us

This is hardly a fresh observation: This is an exhausting era during which every issue is politicized to death.

What is fresh is when Democrats and Republicans join to back a proposal, any proposal. Shades of "the wolf also shall dwell with the lamb," to coin a phrase.
Gov. Mike Beebe and Jim Keet. Dale Bumpers and John Paul Hammerschmidt. Joycelyn Elders and Lisenne Rockefeller. They all support a proposed initiated act seeking to reform campaign financing and limit lobbyists’ influence on Arkansas legislators.

So does Arkansas Business.

The bipartisan Better Ethics Now Committee is seeking 62,500 signatures to place on the ballot a measure proposed by Regnat Populus 2012. The proposal would prohibit direct corporate or union financial contributions to state campaigns, increase the waiting period for legislators to become lobbyists from one year to two years, and bar lobbyists from giving gifts to legislators.

More than 60,000 Arkansans must sign a petition by July 6 if the proposal is to get on the ballot for the fall election. Brent Bumpers and Baker Kurrus, both of Little Rock, co-chair the Better Ethics Now Committee. Kurrus said last week, "We need money and we need signatures."

The proposal would not affect the right of corporations, unions and others to give to political action committees, political parties and super PACs.

Kurrus told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette that he had worked with the Rockefeller family since 1980, and "open, fair and ethical government has been a Rockefeller tradition. In a year when we are celebrating the centennial of Gov. [Winthrop] Rockefeller’s birth, there is no better way to step forward and say we still believe in the things that" he did.

Supporting this effort not only would honor a great adoptive Arkansan; it would honor what we persist in believing is the voters’ wish for fair, honest government, for a government that lives up to our state’s motto: Regnat Populus, "the people rule."

Send this to a friend