The Evansville Courier Press has an editorial entitled Legislative Self-Restraint. They suggest further limiting the number of bills each legislator can introduced in a given session of the General Assembly. They already do this to some extent, particularly in the short session.
The concern is that, with so many bills flying this way and that, legislators can’t realistically read all of them and know what they say. Consequently, they end up relying on the readiest source of information available to them – other legislators and lobbyists.
What’s interesting to me, is the role technology has played in the proliferation of bills. The pace of legislation seems to have kept up with the ability of the General Assembly’s support staff to generate paper and documents. When word processing was more cumbersome, there was something of a physical limitation on the ability to generate and amend legislation. Now that limitation is much reduced.
I’m not against the Courier Press’s proposal to tighten limits on introduced legislation, but I wonder how far you could go before such limitations by each Chamber becomes unconstitutional. I would presume that limiting a legislator to 0 bills would have constitutional problems. (Though maybe not – the Rules of the Chamber, after all are subject to the votes of the members of that chamber.) If 0 is a problem, is a 1 bill limit a problem?
While the volume of bills produced is formidable, it seems that some legislators are much more diligent in reading through the legislation than others. Just as an example, when I worked at LSA (’96 – ’99) it was my impression that Sen. Pat Miller was in earlier than most and stayed later than most reading legislation. I don’t agree with a lot of her positions, but Sen. Miller’s work ethic was beyond reproach.
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