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Those pundits who follow our legislature closely predict that this week's special session will be quite short. The brevity will not be a result of any desire to transact the people's business with dispatch and efficiency. This is an election year, after all, and thus a good time to position one's opponents as enemies of God and country, or else as corporate shills for Qwest and Enron, no matter how long it takes.
Instead, the session will be short because there isn't much air conditioning in the state Capitol, and both chambers have dress codes which forbid sensible outfits like sandals, shorts and baggy T-shirts.
Our Capitol is an old building, and we are frequently reminded that a major renovation is necessary, although they've never got around to it yet. But they will, and we voters must make it clear that while we want a Capitol which can accommodate high-speed computer networks, we do not want it to be air-conditioned.
Mechanical air-conditioning celebrates its centennial this year; it was invented in 1902 by Willis H. Carrier, a mechanical engineer just one year out of college. He worked at a printing plant, where the paper swelled and shrank with the summer heat and humidity, and made precise color reproduction an impossibility -- until Carrier invented modern air-conditioning.
It spread through industry, and in 1924, Hudson Department Store in Detroit became the first retail establishment to offer it for the mere comfort of humans. Theaters soon followed; my father, who has never much cared for movies, recalls frequent trips to the show during his boyhood, just to enjoy the cool relief from summer days in Fort Morgan. On account of the Depression and World War II, air-conditioning didn't spread until the 1950s.
Eventually it reached the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. -- a swampy, torrid Southern town in the summer. This is reflected in the schedule of Congress a century ago. The first session of the 56th Congress adjourned on June 7, 1900 after 186 days; the second session on March 1, 1901 after 91 days.
These are typical for the 10 Congressional sessions from about a century ago that I looked up. The first session was the longer, from 173 to 212 days, adjourning as early as April 28 and as late as July 1. The second session ran from 87 to 93 days and adjourned in March. They always got out of town before the steamy days of July and August.
Now consider the last five convenings of Congress. The first session of the 102nd should have adjourned in 1991, but it lasted for 366 days until March 3, 1992. It was followed by 281 days of the second session, which didn't adjourn until Oct. 9, 1992, less than a month before election day. The first session of the 104th Congress also lasted a full 365 days.
The earliest adjournment in that decade came on Oct. 4, 1996, after 271 days, and the sessions averaged about 300 days, as compared to about 140 days a century ago.
Now, if this extension of congressional time provided some social benefit, we might celebrate this as progress. But since most of us aren't billionaires in need of tax relief, what we get from Congress is generally what we don't want: increased penalties for having the wrong plants in our gardens, criminalizing whatever we might be doing with our computers, user fees on public lands, more surveillance and snooping, etc.
Congress has time for such folly because it can now stay in session all year on account of air-conditioning. If the pernicious cooling devices were removed from the Capitol and various House and Senate office buildings, you can bet they'd tend only to important national matters, and adjourn by Memorial Day every year, to the benefit of our rights and liberties.
That is only one of the evil results of air-conditioning. It may increase street crime -- people sitting on their screened porches keep their eyes on the neighborhood, whereas folks sitting inside their air-conditioned houses just keep their eyes on the TV set.
And it changed the American polity. Air-conditioning made the Old Confederacy a more attractive place to live. In 1900, those 11 states had 98 representatives among the 391 in Congress, or about 25 percent. The 2000 census gave them 131 of 435 seats, or 30 percent. Congressional seats translate into electoral votes, and four of our last five presidents have come from the Confederacy. The Senate majority leader is from Mississippi, and the previous two speakers of the House were from Georgia and Louisiana. We've all suffered the results of all this political power flowing from temperate regions to the air-conditioned Bible Belt.
Given all that, we're fortunate in Colorado that our gold-domed Capitol lacks air-conditioning, and if we want to preserve our rights and liberties, we must keep it that way.
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