Ranking right up there among the year's worst ideas is the one proffered last week by Mel Brown, the House speaker who wants to extend Utah's legislative session from 45 days to 90 days.
These guys do enough damage in the almost seven weeks they meet annually. It's safe to assume the carnage would double under the 90-day plan.It's nuts, and seems especially weird coming from a man who - like many of his legislative colleagues - does a lot of talking about how we need less government, not more.
This is a citizens Legislature by design. It was set up that way by Utah's sage founding fathers, who had some blind spots, to be sure, but also had sense enough to lay out the streets nicely and limit the Legislature to a reasonable limit on the time it gets for mon-key-shines.
Changing it under Brown's scheme would only further remove the legislative process from the rank-and-file resident, in a couple of ways.
- One, it would limit who could be in the Legislature by creating time demands that would be untenable for working people. What typical citizen has 90 days a year to spend on the Hill?
- Two, it would make it even more difficult than it is now for people to keep a handle on what those crafty Solons are drafting in the off-limits hallways and anterooms just beyond the session floor.
It's already an elite, closed crowd at the Legislature, where power and influence are held by a conservative, group of white men, most of whom are LDS, by the way. This, to some degree, is merely a reflection of local demographics. But women - who make up half the population - do not share in the brokering to any substantial degree, nor do people of color or - for that matter - anybody who's not tied in some way to the machinery that drives state lawmaking. It's a widely accepted observation that well-paid lobbyists employed by private industry carry more weight at the Legislature than Joe Six-pack in West Valley City, Ogden or St. George.
And this is a crowd that deserves watching.
As Deseret News political editor Bob Bernick recently reported, a number of our lawmakers have taken campaign money from cigarette companies, which of course is no crime but is worth remembering when bills relating to tobacco start surfacing in the annual melee that starts every January and wraps up none too soon in February.
It's tough enough keeping track of legislation as it is. The state's lawmakers in some past sessions have introduced more than 1,000 bills. Doubling the length of time given to legislating would make it twice as difficult to know what's happening and - who knows? - might see 2,000 bills offered.
Brown has tempered his proposal by saying the Legislature wouldn't meet 90 days in a row and that its new schedule would be spaced out so that members could discuss things more thoroughly.
Maybe his intentions are good, but in an information age in which we're increasingly distracted by any number of new demands, a longer session is a less-noticed one, which cannot be good.
The cynics among you will probably say that if lawmakers are going to spend more time making laws they're going to want more money.
Probably.
Brown wants all members to make the same amount of money. Currently, a lawmaker will typically get anywhere from $5,000 to $12,000 a year, depending generally on travel and time spent overnighting in Salt Lake City. They have a pretty good deal as it is, garnering $100 a day plus $30 in meal money and $65 for lodging. It's not the kind of compensation that's going to draw anybody to the job, but that's the point.
Finally, consider the monotony factor.
Watching a month and a half of TV reporter Chris Vanocur doing overhyped bulletins from the backroom starts hurting somewhere around day three.
Ninety might be unbearable and could actually kill some people.