As a constituent I get regular e-mails from WA State Rep. Joe Schmick (legislative district 9 – the Far East Hinterlands of the state [FEH]). Here’s a sample from today;
”We are now two-thirds of the way through the 2014 legislative session. We spent much of the past two weeks on the House floor debating and voting on House bills. The floor cutoff was this week, meaning any House bill that hasn’t passed the House by now is considered dead (unless it is “necessary to implement the budget” – NTIB). The same goes for Senate bills in the Senate. As of today, the House has passed 333 House bills and the Senate has passed 189 Senate bills. Monday was a very long day that actually stretched into the wee hours of Tuesday as the House passed 100 bills and the Senate passed 21.”
333 bills passed in one session, in one state, announced with no sense of irony– just letting us know that they’re working hard and being “productive” I suppose. Care to guess whether any of those new bills were repeals of previous ones?
With the proliferation of the word “sustainable” in politics, no one has yet considered a sustainability study when it comes to passing so many laws each year for hundreds of years. If this was an average legislative year, and counting from Washington statehood in 1889, that comes to 41,625 bills, not counting local statutes, ordinances, rulings and other bureaucratic restrictions and requirements, nor any jurisprudence concerning any of the same, or anything whatsoever on the federal level, or laws from other states that one might should know about if one were traveling or doing interstate commerce. Washington is one of the youngest states, so others back east have had a lot more time to create more gunk to complicate, distract, hinder and waste people’s lives.
The rest of his letter is inside baseball stuff, shout-outs, name-dropping, awards announcements and the like. I can’t read that stuff without getting a serious case of cotton-mouth and then kicking myself for having wasted so much of my time. It’s like staring at that debilitating, mesmerizing, sickening light you weren’t suppose to look into in that movie “Cowboys and Aliens”.
Zombies. You can’t be around them for long without being infected yourself.
One of these days I’ll write the essay I’ve had on my wish list for a while now: the one that argues that not a single human in the USA knows the law (in spite of “ignorance of the law is no excuse). The reason: there are 250 pages of new law every day — that’s the size of the daily Federal Register.
Your post makes me wonder what the analogous story in the states looks like. How many pages are there each day in the Washington Register? Is there even such a thing?
If there isn’t, that’s interesting in its own right. The FR came into existence at the insistence of (of all people) Brandeis, because of a 1930s era Supreme Court case where one party argued that it couldn’t be charged with violating some regulation because that regulation could not be found in any reasonable way. The flood of c**p in the FR is inexcusable, but a similar flood that isn’t even published would be much worse.
sir:
this is why the republic effectively died w/ the “one man one vote” court decisions, and the end of citizen legislators who met in session every other year, and not very long at that.
i worked a couple sessions of the washington senate as a republican patronage employee. mostly what the legislators did for the first six weeks of the session was drink, play cards, play cards and drink, and screw every ambitious little cute thing who was working her way up the political ladder. i know, i hauled ’em around at night to their various assignations, … , and, they gleefully remarked what fun it was to be boinking women who ordinarily would not give them the time of day, in their every day disguises as fat cigar smoking insurance salesmen.
it was a wonder to behold, democracy in action.
john jay
p.s. nat washington, from ephrata, seemed to me to be the only person in the state senate who had a brain in his head, and who wasn’t concerned about his “political future.” he worked, he served, and was a pleasure to be around.
the rest? eh, who cared?
What I hear you saying then, is that we truly are the Roman Empire in its last days with regard to the vacuousness and debauchery of those in politics. Is that why some pasty white dumpling like Gingrich or Huckabee is in politics? It’s all about the parties, the blow, the money and the girls? So when do we elect a horse to the Senate then?
Can Obama play the violin? We know he can use a lighter.
It’s too late now, but I wish they had included the “limitation of statutes” in the constitutions, state and federal: Laws have an expiration, maybe 10 years unless they pass with a large majority. Murder? Yeah, 2/3 of legislators can agree it’s illegal. Obamacare? NFA? maybe not.
Well here’s one I’d like to see pass: SB 5956
“SB 5956 – DIGEST
(AS OF SENATE 2ND READING 2/18/14)
Allows a person to possess, transport, acquire, or transfer a short-barreled rifle that is legally registered and possessed, transported, acquired, or transferred in accordance with federal law.
Pretty much bring back the ability to own SBR’s, they took that away 21 years ago.