derstand it, the New York Convention
elected to adopt the New York Statute on
lobbying. The Michigan Convention dealt
with lobbying by rule and regulation. Other
Conventions had the same problem. In New
York the statute prescribed sanctions; not
only sanctions of the New York criminal
law, but also the contempt power.
Now the Enabling Act under which we
operate has not given us any sanction
power. We do not apparently have the con-
tempt power, and there is no other provision
of the statute which would in any way in-
flict penalties on anybody who ignored the
regulations of this Convention with respect
to lobbying.
In some quarters there is an argument
that this Convention in effect being a re-
pository of the sovereign people of the Con-
vention assembled could actually invoke
contempt power, and I believe that Delegate
Bamberger informs me over the long history
of these things there are a few isolated
cases on the point, but none of them are
determinative and I for one would not sug-
gest that we take the position that we have
any inherent contempt power. I do not think
it would be worth it. It would create more
problems than it solves, so within the limi-
tations that we have no sanction power, we
have done our best to propose to you a
regulation which would assist the Conven-
tion in knowing with whom it is dealing. In
the end then the only sanctions, aside from
the Convention's power to exclude from ap-
pearances before it in a representative ca-
pacity those who do not comply with the
regulations, the only sanctions we have are
those of the fourth estate, the identification
of the person and the group for whom he
purports to speak, and a disclosure of the
money he is receiving, or the money that he
has spent in advocating a particular point
of view that he is advocating before the
Convention. I will not attempt to go over in
detail each regulation or each section of the
proposed regulation but I would like to deal
with them briefly. I want to say one thing:
The Committee was unanimous, with one
exception, on the question of whether we
should do anything at all about this. Once
it was determined that we should recom-
mend the Convention do something about it,
the Committee was unanimous in recom-
mending that it should cover not only those
who get paid for representing the views of
others, but those who represent the views
of others, and do not get paid for it.
I think we will see a lot of this category
of person, persons who come down to repre-
sent churches, schools, municipal leagues
and what have you, and we just want to |
know, when they say they speak for a group
or an association, that they truly do, and
for whom they speak. I think this is a little
bit different from the situation in the Gen-
eral Assembly. The category of representa-
tive witnesses, as we call the latter cate-
gory, those who do not get paid, will be
very large indeed.
Then let us get to the question of the
persons purported to be covered by this
regulation. We purport to cover every per-
son who is engaged to represent another
person, association, corporation, et cetera,
asset forth in section l(a) [Appendix A]*,
who receives compensation for those efforts.
That category of person must register as
an agent; whether or not he is just talking
to a delegate or writing a delegate or what
have you. The second category we have
elected to call representative witnesses are
those not compensated for their efforts in
advocating the views of others, but who
nevertheless advocate the views of others.
There was some feeling on the committee
that we would like to have this category
of persons reached, whatever they do, when-
ever they contact a delegate. But here we
floundered on the limitations of language.
Could we draw a distinction between the
person that talked to a delegate when he
got home on the weekend or talked to a
delegate on the steps of the State House?
There we gave up and secondly as Congress-
man Sickles pointed out, we might be catch-
ing the little person who never had any
great experience in lobbying before the
legislature, but who nevertheless wants to
acquaint his delegates in his county with
the views, say, of his local P.T.A. or what
have you. If we reached out too broadly in
that direction, we might be fashioning a
net, as it was said, the law being the net
that catches gnats and lets wasps free. We
did not want to penalize the average citizen,
so we perhaps took the cowardly way out.
But it was the only intelligent way out in
view of the situation. We elected to embrace
those people within the requirement of
registration, only when they appeared be-
fore the Convention, or a committee of the
Convention, including the Committee of the
Whole, or a subcommittee of the Conven-
tion. Those people also would be required
to register and they would be designated as
in section I (b) as a representative witness.
We do not require registration by any
person who just appears to present his own
*The reference in brackets refers to the
location of this section in the finalized Rules
of the Constitutional Convention in Mary-
land. |
