Today’s political notebook from the FWJG is entitled Legislators hope short session swift; Daniels differs. The jist of this entry is that the folks who have to get re-elected in ’06 want to “do no harm, go home, and get re-elected.” Daniels, who doesn’t face the voters until 2008, wants to be bold. Apparently, he’ll regain his timidity some time in 2007 (or whenever someone asks him about time zones.)
Philosophically, the short-session should just be about house keeping. Indiana’s General Assembly is set up under the premise of being a ‘citizen legislature,’ meaning these are just ordinary folks who take some time out of their regular lives to go to Indianapolis, do the people’s work, and come home. The bulk of the work is to be done every other year. A lot of this is a fiction of course. The modern world tends to make the position of legislator full time and tends to demand that legislation be ready to go on short notice. But, I think it’s a fiction to which we should aspire.
To me, it often seems that government –unthinking beast that it is– tends to expand as far as technology will allow it. The notion that every problem requires a governmental solution is problematic. Once upon a time, I suppose, physical limitations on travel, communications, and (more prosaically) even document production, limited what government could do, and so legislators had a built in excuse when a concerned citizen “needed” something done. Certainly we shouldn’t let rigid adherence to tradition get in the way when something actually needs to be done quickly. But I think the fiction of a citizen government that meets primarily once every other year is a good way to help keep the state government just a little bit smaller and may tend to help us avoid trading deliberation for speed.
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