On Monday March 9th, the Texas Anti-Corruption Campaign held a press conference calling for the end of corruption culture in Texas politics. The Texas Anti-Corruption Campaign is a new growing alliance between a wide group of nonprofit and political organizations, including: Public Citizen, Audits in the Public Interest, Clean Elections Texas, Common Cause Texas, Libertarian Party of Texas, Texans for Public Justice, and TexPIRG.
The citizen’s movement began as a response to the patronage and cronyism that became synonymous with former Governor Rick Perry’s Administration and has grown as more and more Texas agencies are being investigated for inefficiencies. As Tom “Smitty” Smith, director of our Texas office here at Public Citizen said:
We believe that the people are ultimately responsible to hold the government accountable in the face of rampant corruption and abuse of power. We are paying a corruption tax-billions of our tax dollars are being wasted through cronyism and corruption. We need to stop efforts to defund and handcuff our state funded watchdogs at the Public Integrity Unit and the Ethics Commission. It’s time to take the muzzle off and give them new teeth.
Ethical issues in government were highlighted in the State of the State in which Governor Abbott declared that ethics would be one of the five emergency items he assigned during the 84th Legislature. He said:
“The faith and trust that Texas citizens place in their elected officials requires each of us to conduct the business of the state in the most transparent and honest manner possible. Strengthening our ethics laws relating to disclosure of state contracts with elected officials, prohibiting lawmakers from voting on legislation from which they could profit and increasing disclosure of campaign finance information will ensure a more responsible government for Texas.”
The Texas Anti-Corruption Campaign applauded Governor Abbott’s call for change and hoped to use the momentum to promote good government reform in the legislature. To help solve this issue, the coalition developed a 10-point plan to make progress toward their goal of ending corruption in government.
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