The state’s Democratic lawmakers are forcing through a potentially disastrous bill.
It’s starting to feel a lot like the 19th century around here. We have a “Department of War” again. The president is serving his second non-consecutive term. His foremost political priorities include boosting the federal revenue accrued through tariffs on imported goods and projecting American power into Latin America to displace European influence. Add to all this the brazen effort by America’s state legislators to transform government into a vehicle for graft and fraud.
New Jersey Democrats must have a head full of steam following their party’s performance in November’s off-year elections. Perhaps triumphalism explains why the state’s Democratic lawmakers are forcing through a bill the New York Times warns would “severely weaken a watchdog agency responsible for investigating fiscal misconduct by state leaders and scrutinizing government contracts.”
Proponents of the reform insist that their goal is only to reduce redundancies associated with two state institutions tasked with investigating public corruption: the Office of the State Comptroller (OSC) and the State Commission of Investigation (SCI). The legislation’s critics say the bill would cripple the Comptroller’s office by stripping it of subpoena power. That would give the SCI more responsibility, but it’s not clear what the semi-independent agency would do with it.
As of last November, the SCI couldn’t even say who was running its operations even four months after its executive director died tragically in a car accident. It’s hardly an ineffective body, but its role is to identify waste, fraud, and maladministration — often in theatrical ways — and recommend remedies to prevent future abuses, not implement them. Those calls are frequently ignored. As the Times noted, the SCI hasn’t been “relevant for years” and, this year, it failed to issue a single investigatory report.
Plenty of New Jersey Democrats have objected to this scheme on good governance grounds. On Monday, the state assembly held a marathon committee hearing in which its opponents made their objections known. One of them, U.S. Senator Andy Kim, was treated like trash.
The senator was one of the first three people to request time to address the committee, and he arrived promptly at 9 a.m. for his slot. He was called to testify “dead last,” as the Times noted. He eventually spoke “more than four hours after the hearing began” despite the objections of Kim’s allies, who tried to cede their time to him but were rebuffed. “Nobody’s special,” said the chair of the state government committee, Senator James Beach. When Kim finally had the chance to speak his piece, Beach cut him off abruptly at the three-minute mark. “Sir, I have been here for five-and-a-half hours,” Senator Kim pleaded. “Yeah, so what?” Beach shot back with contempt. “So has everyone else. Why do you think you’re special? You’re not.”
Why are New Jersey Democrats so frustrated with the Comptroller’s office that they would force through a bill that would severely circumscribe the OSC’s remit and make it harder for the agency to obtain evidence in investigations it can still conduct, like inquiries into the state’s Medicaid program? The New Jersey Monitor provides some informed speculation:
The comptroller’s falling out with legislators began in 2023 after the office released a report that Union County had improperly paid some of its top officials, and that conflict heated to a boiling point over the following two years.
Subsequent reports that found waste in Essex County’s COVID-19 vaccine program and procurement violations in Hudson County spurred calls from county officials to rein in the office with legislative hearings.
Some witnesses — including some of the state’s other oversight officials — suggested the bill is retaliation over the comptroller’s work.
“This is for more independent investigations and not less,” the bill’s chief advocate, State Senator Nicholas Scutari, told reporters ahead of Monday’s hearing. He ill-advisedly added that the comptroller has previously been “somebody that is just clamoring for headlines.” Yes, well, exposing and publicizing corruption allegations is what that body does. Or, perhaps, did.
Andy Kim was in voluminous company. Few spoke out in favor of the bill. But the hearing was a perfunctory exercise. In the end, the legislation earned the committee’s seal of approval. The vote in its favor was unanimous.