This was an informal slogan of mine at the Legislative Services Agency. Legislators got impatient. If you’re rushing bill drafts out the door, given limited time to proofread, things are going to get missed. My personal nightmare incident had to do with some telecommunications legislation. The staffer from the Senate kept coming back with changes and requesting revision after revision as she or her bosses changed their minds. The last request came when I was already down at the committee room waiting for the hearing to start. So, we ran back to the office, and I did my best to crank out the latest version for the committee hearing. A “ctrl-v” got mixed up with one of the “ctrl-b” keystrokes, and we ended up with a big chunk of text duplicated. That duplication was noticed at the committee hearing, and the thing had to be scuttled for the day. I took the heat on that one and have always resented it, feeling like the staffer or whoever couldn’t make up their *$&&’n mind should have taken the blame.
Anyway, I have no idea what the situation was behind the FSSA “elimination” that’s in the news lately. Eric Bradner of the Evansville Courier Press has a follow up on the story which was broken by the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette. The underlying problem is that the law creating the Family and Social Services Administration is structured to expire every couple of years. (I’ve been told that the back story on this is that it was requested by legislators who didn’t really want the agency created in the first place; the expiration would theoretically require some consideration as to the agency’s continued existence every few years — despite that, I never heard any serious discussion about dissolving it, however.) So, the default for legislation is for it to go into effect on July 1 of the year. So, too, with the repeal of the statute that makes FSSA expire. Problem was that the sunset statute was effective June 30, 2011. So, theoretically, the agency went out of existence before the statute was repealed.
But, it’s a funny thing about legislation. When you draft a few tons of it, it becomes abundantly clear that there is nothing magic about it. It’s just words on a page. If everyone ignores the enacted legislation, it has no more effect than the mass of paper you throw in the garbage every day. That’s basically what has happened here. The governor has issued an executive order saying, “that’s not what they meant.” And, since everyone worth listening to is going to agree with that, this approach should work. (It becomes controversial if the approach is later used to justify a similar approach when the intent is not at all clear.)
Bradner says:
It’s not the only mistake that’s been made, though. Legislators have also discovered errors in new laws that govern project labor agreements and that allow felons to seal the records that show their checkered pasts.
These problems demonstrate what happens when the bill-drafting Legislative Services Agency, and the lawmakers responsible for the ideas LSA’s lawyers put to paper, are rushed.
. . .
With so many changes to make, it’s no wonder a few corrections are needed. This is what can happen when a part-time Legislature where many of the 150 members are not lawyers takes on such a huge agenda.There are professions where mistakes are not acceptable; where they come with far-ranging consequences. Bad police work can jeopardize a huge case. Careless doctors can end lives.
That’s why we are glad to see those people sacrifice speed and efficiency for laserlike attention to every single detail.
We should demand the same focus from the legislators responsible for making the laws by which more than 6 million Hoosiers must abide — even when that means slowing down.
I’ll add that getting legislators to slow down and listen felt like a major task even during ordinary years. A lot of them were busy, “big picture” types without a lot of patience for detail. There were others who were not too busy and spent a great deal of time poring over the details. One of the legislators who comes to mind as being very conscientious in this regard is Senator Pat Miller — I’ve had unflattering things to say about her policy preferences, but I’ll never accuse her of being inattentive to detail.
On the local level, West Lafayette Councilor Ann Hunt is someone who I may have disagreed with on many issues but who always read every word of every Ordinance, double checked, tripple checked and cross referenced every change.
I won’t mention the Councilors who were more inclined to read the title of the Ordinance, get a gut feel on the debate, and just be happy to go ahead and vote, but there always seem to be quite a few of them in every legislative body, certainly at the local level – and probably at the national level too.
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The worst part about the whole thing, was that often times when someone like Councilor Hunt was asking questions, trying to check that the details were all right. That the um “less concerned” Councilors would get visibly upset with the delay, the time spent checking the details over.
They would often not object on the record, but they would make it clear with sighs or eye rolling that they were annoyed that someone else was “wasting” their time doing a complete, and through job, architecting laws that would affect thousands of people and families.
Disagree on policy sure, that is fine, but unfortunately more often then not it is very hard for a voter to tell the difference between an Ann Hunt and an eye rolling elected official.
Delay is preferable to error.
–Thomas Jefferson