For candidates, home is where they say it is

Politicians are notoriously bad at passing laws that might bite the hand that writes them.

Congress likes to exempt its members from various statutes and regulations on the flimsy excuse that an elected official’s job is not like yours or mine. Getting into office requires one skill set, representing a wide range of interests requires another.

At the state level, lawmaking sometimes gets up close and personal. Legislators can get tough on armed robbery and drug deals because they don’t imagine themselves, or their pals at the country club, ever doing things like that.

A few years ago, it was hard for the Legislature to toughen drunk-driving laws because most members grew up in an era when that wasn’t taken too seriously. Similarly, divorce, child custody and even domestic violence bills might hit close to home for members.

And they’ll always be working on election laws, especially the financing of campaigns, because, as they say around the Capitol, every member “has a dog in that fight.” Gift-disclosure limits, eventually a flat ban on lobbyist largesse, took years to enact. And who wants to pass a law regulating how much money they can receive from political donors?

Another problem legislators will never solve is the seemingly simple idea of where lawmakers live. You and I know our homes. But, chances are, our jobs don’t require us to live in the city, the county or some other defined area.

Essentially, officeholders are supposed to live in their political districts. This furthers the myth that our officeholders are just like us. They’re not. With rare exception, they are wealthier and they have jobs they can leave for months at a time, not to mention friends who will raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for them.

The requirement of living in your district is a silly adherence to arbitrarily drawn boundaries. Every 10 years, there’s a bit of reapportionment musical chairs as state legislators move into redrawn districts for re-election. Members of Congress only have to be residents of their states, not their districts, but it’s usually politically prudent to live where they run.

There are legitimate reasons not to, though. Sometimes, you get elected and they move the district line on you – maybe just a couple of blocks.

Several years ago, we had two state senators get married – to each other, that is – which posed a peculiar political predicament. Sen. Dexter Lehtinen and his wife, Sen. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, kept their houses in the Miami area and maybe they alternated days or weeks in each place.

The problem worked itself out when she was elected to Congress and he left the Legislature.

Legally determining where a legislator’s home is depends, as Bill Clinton might say, on what the definition of “is” is. State legislators are required to sign a statement attesting that they live in their districts, upon election, and the test is pretty much common sense – where they get their mail, the address on their driving licenses, register their kids for school and generally hang their hats.

But you can do a lot of that on paper, and it’s hard to prove someone doesn’t live where they claim to live.

We’ve had it a few times locally, with County Commissioner Bill Proctor insisting he lived in a home in his district, and not in a nicer place across town.

Last week, the insoluble question arose when chronic City Hall critic Erwin Jackson filed suit against the Leon canvassing board and Commissioner Scott Maddox. Jackson is claiming that the recently re-elected commissioner’s real home “is the expansive million-dollar estate he owns outside the city … not the small rented office space he claims as his residence solely for political purposes.”

Maddox contends that he’s selling the big house and his North Adams Street place meets all legal criteria as his address for city commission purposes.

It’s hard to pick a hero or a villain in this clash of old foes.

Maddox has run for so many offices, Charlie Crist sometimes tells him, “Dude, make up your mind!” It’s not hard to imagine him, like scores of candidates before him, contriving a quite-legal way around the residency requirement.

And Jackson would complain if they hanged him with a brand new rope.

Maddox will probably prevail – partly because Jackson has tilted windmills a few times before, and partly because the definition of residency is so murky.

Which is just how the politicians want it.

Bill Cotterell is a retired Democrat reporter who writes a twice-weekly column for the paper. He can be contacted at bcotterell@tallahassee.com