Legislator Accountability Quotes

I've been not only articulating the dissatisfaction with Albany, I've been acting on it. I've been very aggressive in bringing public integrity cases and public corruption cases and bringing cases against sitting legislators.

Thomas Edison invented a voting machine so that legislators can just press a button. It was a failure. Legislators didn’t want people to know how they had voted.

You can reform a political culture, but it’s a big lift. First, the voters would have to convince the legislators that they’re being watched by someone other than the lobbyists. Then they’d have to press for laws that would force a change of behavior, like nonpartisan redistricting and ethics reform. Then the voters would have to follow up, year after year, until the old guard was replaced by a whole new generation who went into politics with dreams of drafting serious legislation, rather than just bringing more stuff back into the district or, at worst, shaking down some landlord at the airport for a thousand bucks.

At what point do the people tell the politicians to go to hell? At what point do they get off the couch, march down to their state legislator’s house, pull him outside, and beat him to a bloody pulp for being an idiot?

No legislator ever got in trouble for voting against a bill that passed or for a bill that didn’t pass.

Recently the country has seen too much of our legislators, seeing them as a gaggle of check-kiting, judge-smearing deadbeats who don't pay their restaurant bills but raise their pay in the middle of the night. Many Americans-this columnist included-hitherto said tax increases are justified by the budget deficit now say: Give that mob more money? Never. Not a nickel of new taxes until term limits change the political culture on Capital Hill.

It's different from Washington in that in the legislature, you have to go home and have a job and actually make a living on your own. That gives you a different perspective.

As lawmakers, our job is to listen to our constituents. If our phones are ringing off the hook with people demanding to know where we stand on an issue, we pay attention.

The accountability of state legislators is so much more than federal legislators.