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As Mark Twain and Will Rogers did not observe, No
man's life, liberty or property is safe while the
legislature is in session.
More precisely, if Twain or
Rogers did make that observation, he probably wasn't the
first.
Recent scholarship appears to have tracked it to 1866 and a New York judge named Gideon Tucker. However, no place I checked had a source for the quotation, and so some mystery remains as our legislature prepares to end its session this week.
While there are many reasons to be grateful that the General Assembly will adjourn, chief among them is the wide selection of bills that they could have considered and perhaps passed, but did not:
Children's Emotional Security Act of 2005. A bill was
proposed to require employers to give unpaid leave to
parents to attend school events. The last I heard, it had
been laid over indefinitely,
which is another way to
say dead.
But bills have come back from that
graveyard before, and besides, why stop there?
After all, the state could require parents to attend every concert, play, game, practice and the like. Failure to appear, once work is no longer a valid excuse, will result in an extensive investigation by the relevant county's social services department, followed by court hearings to determine the full extent of the emotional devastation suffered by a 9-year-old whose parents failed to watch soccer practice.
Previous generations may have attained adulthood and
gone on to live productive lives without this emotional
protection, but who could now oppose a law which has both
children
and security
in its title?
Enhanced Motor Safety Law. There was wide support for
making failure to wear a seat belt a primary
offense,
rather than a secondary offense.
What's the difference? If it's a primary offense, a peace officer can pull you over for that alone. If it's a secondary, he has to find some other excuse, like a defective tail light, to pull you over, and then he can also cite you for failure to wear a seat belt.
I'm compulsive about wearing my seat belt, and reasonably insistent that passengers buckle up too. And I realize that society incurs certain costs (somebody has to scrape bodies off the pavement) when people don't wear seat belts.
But I prefer that the police and state troopers devote their attention to activities that imperil others, rather than seat belt usage. In other words, I want them watching for weavers, speeders, stop-sign ignorers, crosswalk penetrators, red-light runners and other violators who can be seen at a reasonable distance.
After all, if we're going to criminalize the use or
non-use of the equipment inside a car, it's got to be more
dangerous to be on a road near someone whose stereo is
blasting Born to be Wild
or Bad to the Bone
than someone who isn't wearing a belt. And what about a big
insulated mug of road-rage-fueling high-caffeine
triple-mocha espresso. These people are a threat to the
rest of us, and if we're going to empower the police to
snoop further inside vehicles, that's where we should
start, not with seat belts.
Lobbyist Convenience Protection Act. When a House committee held a hearing in Glenwood Springs earlier this year, there were some complaints. The out-of-town location did make it simpler for mere citizens to testify about how they had been affected by oil and gas drilling on their land. But it was inconvenient for the oil and gas lobbyists who were comfortably ensconced at the statehouse.
To protect those beleagured corporate apologists in the future, there should be a law requiring their permission before any legislative hearing can be held away from the Capitol.
Maximum Stream Flow Harvest Law. Instead of worrying about recreational instream flow rights keeping too much water in our rivers, some legislators could promote this bill, which would set a maximum for each river, and all water in excess of the maximum would be diverted to the Front Range, thereby saving decades of potential litigation.
So, as the session ends, we may be annoyed by some of the laws enacted by our legislature. But we have to be pleased about the many laws they didn't propose, consider or pass.
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