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.