Let us now praise famous (or hoping to be famous) lawmakers.
After two heel-dragging special sessions, legislators are hangdog and loveless. The media magnifies the “you guys are worthless” trope. The benefits of serving could be yours: Interminable days responding to constituent needs, policy fine-tuning, meetings, meetings with wonks who only speak bureaucratese, grocery shopping (brace for spittle from customers who confuse the feds with the state) and then, well, “sleep.” Any takers?
The Legislature was a disappointment this year, yes. No transportation-revenue package and an operating budget that doesn’t tackle special-interest loopholes maneuvered by flush lobbyists. Who is accountable? Gridlock falls on legislative leadership.
Herein lies the irony, that this week Senate majority leader Rodney Tom floated a red-meat, throwaway brainstorm of a $250-a-day fine for special-session overtime. It’s a spread-the-misery gimmick that docks legislators from Wenatchee to Monroe, and takes the onus off Tom.
A local TV station seized the story’s populist oomph with person-on-the-street interviews. Fine those do-nothings!
Tom also recommends nixing lawmakers’ optional, $90 per diem. As lip service would have it, The Herald’s Jerry Cornfield reports that Tom, a Medina millionaire, collected $1,440 in per diem for the second special session and $1,890 for the first, for a total of $3,330. Message: Stop me before I per diem again.
This is groan-inducing for workaday legislators who aim to carve a meaningful legacy. The answer to gridlock is politics as the art of the possible.
The Washington Policy Center’s Jason Mercier offers constructive alternatives to Tom, including adding teeth to the existing law requiring a budget be inked by June 1. Mercier also advocates pushing up the revenue forecast which may speed up budget-making.
How about accepting nada from registered lobbyists? Lobbyists are juiced to influence the budget process, and they compound the overtime trend.
Washington needs to attract the best people to public life, and many Snohomish County legislators are exceptional. The antidote to cynicism is farsighted, risk-taking leadership. But history can be unkind.
As Gary Wills writes in “A Necessary Evil,” our tradition of government bashing is historically embedded. “It is a tradition that belittles America, that asks us to love our country by hating our government, that turns our founding fathers into unfounders, that glamorizes frontier settlers in order to demean what they settled, that obliges us to despise the very people we voted for.” Wills writes. “Our country, our founders, our representatives deserve better.”
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