Legislature's failures have many fathers

By Larry Dale Keeling

Herald-Leader Columnist

FRANKFORT --

What a fitting end to the 2008 General Assembly.

Total chaos. Utter confusion. An indifference toward legal niceties that led to a resurrection of the good old days of stopped clocks and floor sessions that ran beyond the constitutional midnight witching hour into the wee hours of the morning. (Darn those computerized time stamps.)

And most fitting for this session, the really good stuff was left twisting in the wind — a wind generated by excessive amounts of hot air — when the gavels finally fell.

Shoot, when sine die was uttered, even the roads portion of the projects package that was put together to buy House votes for an ugly budget was left hanging with the really good stuff.

If there is a telling vignette about the anarchy and disarray that marked this session’s final hours, it is the fact that lawmakers left projects on the table when they went home. The last time that happened, hell froze over, pigs flew, the sun came up in the west and earthlings carved up the moon for a feast of green cheese.

Of course, the blame game started immediately. Senate President David Williams said the House needs some backbone, apparently a reference to that chamber’s reluctance, in the face of intense lobbying by labor groups, to pass a compromise pension-reform bill that actually gave the House much of what it wanted.

House Speaker Jody Richards accused Senate Republicans of orchestrating a “contrived, calculated move” to delay key decisions until the session’s closing hours, in an attempt to force the House into agreeing with Senate proposals if it wanted to get anything done.

Gov. Steve Beshear, as he has often done in the past, talked about a “dysfunctional” legislative process in which “partisanship trumps good government.”

Amen to each assessment.

Dysfunctional is an apt description for this General Assembly session, but its dysfunction exceeded that of other recent sessions only by a matter of degree. And there is more than enough blame to go around.

Williams is right about the lack of backbone among the Democrats who control the House. They often are so afraid of their own shadows they can’t even decide which vehicle should lead off a one-car funeral procession.

Richards is right about Senate Republicans’ fascination with (addiction to?) playing brinkmanship games in hopes House Democrats’ timidity will cause them to buy into the belief that bad bills are better than no bills at all.

But the Senate couldn’t play those games without the complicity of the House. Decisions on key pieces of legislation get pushed back to the final hours because both sides engage in delaying tactics that waste the limited number of days in a session.

But let’s not ignore Beshear’s contribution to the debacle.

As governor, he has a bully pulpit that enables him to go over the heads of lawmakers and appeal directly to voters. It can be particularly useful when a governor confronts legislative reluctance to buy into such ideas as pension reform, ethics reform, casino gambling or cigarette-tax hikes.

Much has been made of the fact that Beshear squandered his political capital and his post-election momentum with a foolish foray into the special election for the Senate’s 30th District seat. And such analysis is dead on.

But there is another fact that must be considered: Having squandered his momentum in the 30th District, Beshear did little to regain momentum by asserting himself as governor, by using his bully pulpit to take his message directly to the people and put pressure on lawmakers to deal with important issues rather than play games with them.

Beshear might not have been able to save this session by making more use of his pulpit, but he at least would have looked more gubernatorial as his agenda went down in flames around him.

Reach Larry Dale Keeling at (859) 231-3249, 1-800-950-6397, ext. 3249 or lkeeling@herald-leader.com.