Monday, May 20, 2024

A modest proposal*

The other day I was fussing and fuming here about the Minnesota legislature, among other things. These recent articles (Chaotic end leaves Democratic Legislature with a few wins and Legislature adjourns with mega-omnibus, loud finger-pointing as DFL leaders shut down GOP delays to meet deadline) reinforce my negative assessment. We have reached a point at which scoring points is more important than solving problems. Politics is (pardon me) trumping governance. But, much of the issue stems from a process problem. Hence, my borrowing the *Jonathan Swift phrase for today’s title. Here’s my proposal to help the kids do a better job of playing together in the sand box we pay them to play in.

“I Voted” sticker in red with white text
I Voted
Photo by J. Harrington

Let's create and get enacted a constitutional amendment that structures the legislative process to minimize the type of endings that have become all too typical. I presume you know that our legislature meets in biennial (2 year) sessions. The amendment would prohibit, except for emergencies, enacting laws the first year of a session. That year would be spent holding hearings, crafting language, outreaching to stakeholders, including taxpayers, and answering the question a former state senator used to ask in conference committees [at about 2 am]: “What’s the problem we’re here to solve?”

The second year of a session would be used to ensure the required processes and procedures are followed to preclude whatever got enacted being promptly declared invalid for some legal, technical rationale. In that vein, the last week of the session would be reserved for action only on revisor’s corrections to previously passed legislation. No last minute negotiating nor games played. That all has to get done in year one of the biennium.

If voters didn’t have such short memories, or paid more attention in the first place, we wouldn’t find that representatives and senators paid more attention to lobbyists than to constituents. We would then more regularly “Vote the rascals out!”

Does the proposal above seem like a concept worth developing to bring democracy back to our governance? Feel free to leave a comment.


On Laws


Then a lawyer said, But what of our Laws,
master?
    And he answered:
    You delight in laying down laws,
    Yet you delight more in breaking them.
    Like children playing by the ocean who
build sand-towers with constancy and then
destroy them with laughter.
    But while you build your sand-towers the
ocean brings more sand to the shore,
    And when you destroy them the ocean
laughs with you.
    Verily the ocean laughs always with the
innocent.
 
    But what of those to whom life is not an
ocean, and man-made laws are not sand-
towers,
    But to whom life is a rock, and the law
a chisel with which they would carve it in
their own likeness?
    What of the cripple who hates dancers?
    What of the ox who loves his yoke and
deems the elk and deer of the forest
stray and vagrant things?
    What of the old serpent who cannot
shed his skin, and calls all others naked
and shameless?
    And of him who comes early to the
wedding-feast, and when over-fed and tired
goes his way saying that all feasts are
violation and all feasters lawbreakers?
 
    What shall I say of these save that they
too stand in the sunlight, but with their
backs to the sun?
    They see only their shadows, and their
shadows are their laws.
    And what is the sun to them but a caster
of shadows?
    And what is it to acknowledge the laws
but to stoop down and trace their shadows
upon the earth?
    But you who walk facing the sun, what
images drawn on the earth can hold you?
    You who travel with the wind, what
weather-vane shall direct your course?
    What man’s law shall bind you if you
break your yoke but upon no man's prison
door?
    What laws shall you fear if you dance
but stumble against no man’s iron chains?
    And who is he that shall bring you to
judgment if you tear off your garment yet
leave it in no man’s path?
 
    People of Orphalese, you can muffle the
drum, and you can loosen the strings of the
lyre, but who shall command the skylark
not to sing?


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