The Indiana General Assembly’s Organization Day will take place on Tuesday, November 18, 2008. From the outside, this always looked a lot like the first day of school when everyone is happy to see everyone else after summer vacation. Nothing substantive or controversial typically happens on organization day. The General Assembly just convenes to implement some of the (as the name would imply) organizational framework that will be used when they get together for real business soon after the first of the year. The session begins in earnest on January 6, 2009.

As I’ve mentioned, my old job was at the Legislative Services Agency. Now is about the time bill requests from legislators start coming in more quickly. Things may have changed since 1999, but back then, the legislator would typically meet with the director of LSA or of its bill drafting office, saying “I want a bill that does x, y, and z.” That request then typically gets assigned to a drafter/attorney, usually one who does a fair amount of work in the area of the request. (I believe the request also gets assigned to a fiscal analyst who prepares a fiscal impact statement — I was one of the bill drafting attorneys, not a fiscal analyst, so I don’t know as much about how their side of things work(ed).)

Often times, the request was dead simple or even an identical rehash of a bill that had been created in previous years. In those cases, you could just gin up the bill without having to get more details from the legislator. Other times there were unanticipated wrinkles or ambiguities with the request where you’d have to get further input from the legislator about his or her policy preferences. Still other times, the legislator would indicate that the drafter should talk to a particular constituent or lobbyist for further input on how the bill should look.

Bill requests were typically in full roar by the first of December — occasionally, I heard stories about legislators swinging by the State House to drop off their bill requests on their way to somewhere warm for Christmas Vacation. Those stories always warmed you up as a drafter who had to cut any holiday plans short to deal with the crush of legislation that had to be drafted by the first part of January. There are things I miss about drafting legislation. The 12 hour days around the holidays are not any of them.

I’m having company over to watch the Colts game today. Yesterday, I noticed I only had two beers left in the refrigerator. It’s not likely to be much of a drinking affair, for all I know, two beers is enough — but hospitality would seem to dictate I have at least a couple more available. So, I stopped by the liquor store on Saturday and picked up a six pack of Bell’s Kalamazoo Stout to add to the stock. No big deal, really.

However, it’s annoying that it’s not an option to make a beer run during half-time if necessary. Indiana’s blue laws prohibit liquor sales on Sundays. I’ve heard that this has its roots, not only in a more religious time, but also in a more racist time in the early 20th century where such laws were seen as a way to stick it to the Papists. Now, these laws mainly hang around because of inertia and because they benefit certain members of the liquor industry.

Bill Ruthhart, writing for the Indianapolis Star, has an article on a poll showing that Hoosiers are warming up to the idea of liquor sales on Sundays.

The poll showed 46 percent of Hoosiers support changing that law while 45 percent favor keeping it. Another 9 percent were undecided.

That shows a slight move from two years ago when a poll conducted by The Star found that 50 percent of Hoosiers favored the Sunday ban while 43 percent opposed it.

Thomas at Blue Indiana had a post on the subject yesterday. Notable in that post and in the initial story is the objection of liquor store owners who feel that lifting the prohibition would put them at a disadvantage with more general retailers like grocery stores. Sunday sales of the liquor stores, they say, wouldn’t be enough to compensate for the cost of paying employees and the overhead of staying open on Sunday. The grocery stores are open anyway. To the extent this is true, I find myself unmoved. As I noted over in the Blue Indiana comments:

Mom & Pop Liquor stores don’t exactly fill me with nostalgia. If Sunday liquor sales drove them out of business, I don’t think the loss would really diminish our communities a lot — the way I think they are diminished to some extent when small downtown retailers end up knuckling under to Wal-mart.

I suppose my attitude would be different if most small liquor stores were places where a wider variety of beer and wine were stocked and the owner was on duty most times and was very knowledgeable about beers and wines. But that has not been my experience — for the most part, these liquor stores end up being somewhat sad places, staffed by low wage, short-term employees and mostly just stocking the most mass produced beers and wines.

In those that lead to an exchange about imports versus Indiana beers. So, here is a plug for the Hoosier Beer Geek, a great way to keep up on the local beer scene.

According to an article by Mike Smith, writing for the Associated Press, Representative Charlie Brown says he will introduce legislation to ban smoking in public places state wide.

Smoking would be snuffed out in almost all enclosed public places in Indiana, including restaurants, bars, bowling alleys and casinos, under a bill a powerful state lawmaker plans to push in the upcoming legislative session.

“It is a public health issue,” said Democratic state Rep. Charlie Brown of Gary, chairman of the House Public Health Committee. He said his primary aim is protecting the health of non-smokers who work in places where smoking is allowed.

(I wonder if Mike died a little bit inside when he wrote “smoking would be snuffed out”.)

Smoking is a tricky one, civil liberties-wise. Your right to swing your arms ends at the tip of my nose, as the saying goes. If smokers could find a way to keep their smoke out of my air, I would have more sympathy for their arguments about their rights being infringed when these smoking bans are implemented. But then, you get a whole new layer when you start asking whose air it is at a public establishment with employees: Do patrons have a claim on the air? Do employees have a claim on the air? The owner of the business? The landlord of the business?

As I’ve said before, libertarianism doesn’t deal well with pollution. It’s hard to keep particulate matter out of the air and water, it’s hard to determine when and how much that particulate matter is damaging someone else, and it’s hard to find a cost-effective remedy for such damage once it has been caused. Smoking is a form of pollution.

Another question is to ask whether smoking regulations are better handled at the federal, state, or local level. I don’t have strong opinions there. It’s not based on strong convictions, but I suppose I’d like to see a regime where smoking is permitted at places with other “vices” — bars and casinos and the like, but not at other public venues.

(As a matter of my own personal comfort, I would like it if I never had to encounter cigarette smoke anywhere. I hate the stuff — it smells awful, it makes my clothes reek, if my wife goes somewhere smoky, I end up having to smell it in her hair, and I have unpleasant memories of the smoke filled car on family trips when my parents used to smoke. Generally, when I have to encounter it, cigarette smoke decreases my quality of life to one extent or another.)

Riding a hot streak of economic success (per Gov. Daniels), Indiana’s trust fund for jobless benefits is running out, and Indiana is seeking a loan from the federal government to cover the unemployment benefits.

The state will have to borrow the money by the end of this year or early next year, said Scott Sanders, chief financial officer at the Department of Workforce Development.

That’s because more money is going out in unemployment benefits than is coming in from business taxes, an imbalance that began in 2000, when the year-end balance was $1.6 billion.

Indiana is one of five states with insolvent unemployment insurance trust funds. The others are Ohio, New York, South Carolina, and Michigan. Indiana has $91 million in the bank with average monthly benefits of $66 million.

The news of the deficiency in unemployment funds juxtaposed with all I’ve been hearing in the recent political campaign about the relative strength of Indiana’s economy reminded me of a bit from Monty Python’s “The Meaning of Life.” (Confirmation, as if any were needed, that I am in fact a nerd.) It’s in the bit immediately following the “Every Sperm is Sacred” musical number.

Dad: So you see my problem, little ones… I can’t keep you here any longer.

Shout from the back: Speak up!

Dad: [raising his voice] I can’t keep you here any longer… God has blessed us so much that I can’t afford to feed you anymore.

Lawmakers will be looking at ways to fix the problem. (Probably something that should have been fixed long ago — I’m sure there is plenty of blame to go around on that score.)

Rep. Randy Borror, R-Fort Wayne, said the trust fund will likely be a contentious topic for lawmakers in January. Although the options seem simple — reduce benefits or raise taxes on businesses — there are many ways within the system to achieve both.

For example, legislators could limit who is eligible for unemployment rather than cut the maximum weekly benefit of $390. Or the General Assembly could raise the taxable wage base on which employers pay. The state is at the federal minimum of $7,000 while the national average last year was $13,855.

Mike Smith, writing for the Associated Press, looks beyond the happy talk about bipartisanship in Indiana state government and sees some fights shaping up. House Republicans want to push immediately for a resolution to amend the Indiana Constitution to mandate property tax caps for eternity. House Democrats want to see how the legislated property tax caps work in practice before enshrining them in the Constitution. Senate Republicans are making noises about flat-lining education spending which isn’t likely to go over well with the House Democrats. And the House Republicans want to advance a new college scholarship program.

Let the games begin. And, with this post, I have added a “2009 Indiana General Assembly” category. Hard to believe I’ve been at this for just shy of four years.