At 10:45 this morning, 15 minutes before the scheduled informational meeting of the Government Administration & Elections Committee, Jeff Garfield, outgoing executive director of the State Elections Enforcement Commission (see yesterday’s post), was allowed a few minutes of valedictory remarks to the committee. Rep. James Spallone, D-Essex, allowed this “point of personal privilege” to occur, even though the meeting was officially noticed for 11 a.m. and Garfield was not on the invited agenda to speak on ways to fix the campaign-finance system that a federal judge recently overruled.
Garfield called the state’s 2005 law “The mother of all reforms,” during his final five minutes before the panel that he’s testified before hundreds of times during his 30 years as director of the SEEC.
So now it’s nearly 11:25, 25 minutes past the scheduled start of the committee meeting, and the meeting has yet to be convened and the picture on CTN, the government-controlled propaganda TV station, shows only a couple members of the committee’s legal staff sitting around the table.
