trent seibert gets results
Democrats cancel party with lobbyists
Tonight’s dinner for lawmakers — which was going to feature a keynote speech by a lobbyist giving “a full report on the current status of the Tennessee General Assembly” — was canceled abruptly yesterday.
. . . House Speaker Jimmy Naifeh, D-Covington, said The Tennessean story triggered the cancellation.
The dinner speaker was to be lobbyist John Lyell, who represents special interests such as health-care companies and Realtors.
Wait a minute! Yesterday, Representative Joe Fowlkes said
“It’s just a party . . . There’s nothing wrong with it.”
If there was nothing wrong with it, why did you cancel it?
March 16th, 2006 at 6:10 am
[…] This item about the recently cancelled Democratic Caucus lobbyist-legislator party appears on today’s editorial page: After this newspaper printed a story about the gathering, organizers reconsidered the event and canceled it. It’s baffling how such a project ever got off the ground. The arrest of five current and former legislators in a corruption case last year put a spotlight on the cozy relationships lawmakers have with lobbyists. The governor called a special session on ethics, and the session produced a major ethics reform bill. Everybody thought the legislature had learned its lesson. But apparently not all did. […]