Ridiculous Catch-22 in state lobbying law

If you saw Ben Niolet's eye-popping stories this week about a mind-boggling Catch-22 in state law that was designed to bring more transparency to state government but which actually blocks that transparency, you're already wondering whether the right hand in Raleigh knows what the left hand is doing. Here's a link to Ben's latest story in the Observer, which also appeared in the News & Observer in the state capital.

In a nutshell, the story says that former highly-rated lobbyist Don Beason is fighting a $111,000 fine imposed for a violation of the state lobbying law by the Secretary of State's office. By law that office enforces state law, and evidently it charged Beason several years ago with being paid with money from five undisclosed clients that was channeled through a New Jersey company. The scheme evidently was to hide the real employer of the lobbyist. Beason said he did nothing wrong and worked only for a properly registered client.

And while state law establishes a way to enforce requirements that lobbyists must register with the office and abide by state reporting requirements, it also prevents the state from disclosing any details of an investigation or the outcome of any action taken. We would not know about the fine that Beason is fighting at all if he were not fighting the fine before an administrative law judge. How many others have been sanctioned? None? Some? A lot? We don't know thanks to this baffling contradiction in state policy.

Secretary of State Elaine Marshall, who set up a commission to study state lobbying laws several years ago, which led to beefing up the state's laws, sought advice last year from the state attorney general's office to see if she could disclose information. Attorney General Roy Cooper's office examined the law and concluded that not only could Marshall not disclose anything about an investigation, but also could not say whether a lobbyist was sanctioned for a violation. That's because the General Assembly wrote the law in a way that restricts release of information about lobbying enforcement actions.

This is surely among the top 10 most ridiculous things I've heard of in my more than 33 years of covering Raleigh. The whole point of requiring lobbyists to register and to disclose what they spend to lobby is to allow the public to know who's trying to influence the passage or defeat of legislation.

And the whole point of beefing up penalties -- which once were a well-known joke in North Carolina -- was to improve compliance with lobbying laws. The theory was that lobbyists would not want to be judged as having not complied with state law, let alone pay a hefty fine.

But when the law prevents the public from knowing who has been found in violation of state lobbying law, there's no transparency, there's less incentive for lobbyists to comply with the law and the joke just gets worse.

You'll see in Ben's story that legislators are shocked -- SHOCKED! -- to learn that they didn't require public disclosure of at least the outcome of any sanctions levied against lobbyists. And maybe some legislators did not know that's what they were doing. Maybe legislative leaders in the rush to get other things done weren't quite aware that they had created this tomfool loophole in the law that protects lobbyists from being found out.

Maybe. And maybe thunder will curdle milk, too.

The ghost of Joseph Heller must be laughing its head off by now. Even novelist Heller couldn't have come up with such an absurd Catch-22.