If you want to "bribe" someone, you don't hand them cash. You fly them to that industry conference in Hawaii in February. You give their spouse a non-job. You give them great interest rates on loans. You help their kid get into college. You buy the house next to theirs, tear it down, and make it a beautiful, lush lawn.<p>* Those are all real situations.<p>Protip: This is not a Republican vs Democrat issue.. just people getting massive kickbacks for using their power in specific ways.
> <i>Lawmakers who are found guilty of violating the act face $1,000 in fines and up to one year in prison. </i><p>This seems to be a bizarrely asymmetric pair of punishments. Someone on higher than the average wage can pay $1k without blinking, but a year in prison is career-crippling.
I'm curious as to what emergency the state is going through right now. At face value it only seems to be an emergency of abuse of power and breach of ethics...