CHEYENNE — It was a good thing for the Legislature to quit two days early this year.
That way the lawmakers could not do any more damage to the Legislature as an institution than they already have.
In this session, the largest mistake was the blowing up of the supplemental budget.
Years ago, the general session was expanded and named a general and budget session to take care of emergency and other items that could not wait for the budget session the following year.
It was designed largely to avoid the need for special sessions which are disruptive for citizen legislators and cost a lot of money.
It was also a hedge against the creation of a full-time professional legislature.
The dumping of the budget this year sent legislators scurrying to tack on their programs to some other bills without violating the constitutional requirement that bills contain only one subject.
In previous sessions, the normal procedure was for the senate and house to compromise on such things as the budget, like simply dividing the appropriations in half between the house and senate preferences.
But apparently there was no compromise this year or even an attempt; it is not clear what happened.
So be it — but there is already talk of a special session here.
Another downside of the session was that while the hard right wing Freedom Caucus which controlled the house, achieved its goals on legislation, it was, in some cases, without basically any debate or discussion.
For this, I blame the caucus leaders for failure to educate their new members on things legislators need to know like how to read a bill other than telling them to shut up and vote.
Their approach resulted in a drastic difference in a state house where usually there were so many legislators lined up at the microphone to debate a bill that the session went into the evening hours.
And that is the way it should be.
The other problem is with committees.
Committee bills are the backbone of the legislature; their job is to screen dozens of bills and hold public hearings on the major ones.
Because they have been vetted, committee and task force bills have been given top priority by legislative leaders to be on the floor for debate.
Unfortunately, the Freedom Caucus apparently does not like committee bills.
During this session an unusually large number of committee bills were killed while the winners were Freedom Caucus hot button culture issue bills, sponsored by individual legislators, many of them freshman or otherwise relatively new lawmakers.
This raises the question of whether interim committee studies — another piece of the legislative institution — are worth the cost and effort if the results will be dumped on introduction.
The legislative management council will decide about the interim studies — if any— in a meeting later this year.
I am hoping the Legislature will hold fast to its traditions. Maybe next year will be better.
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Contact Joan Barron at 307-632-2534 jmbarron@bresnan.net
