You might think it was Mark Twain or Will Rogers who observed, “No man’s life, liberty or property is safe while the legislature is in session,” but recent scholarship appears to have tracked the quotation to 1866 and a New York judge named Gideon Tucker. Even that’s not a certainty, but the quip remains apt as our legislature ends its session this week.
While there are many reasons to be grateful that the General Assembly will adjourn, chief among them is the wide selection of bills that they could have considered and perhaps passed, but did not. (These first two are real bills – but the titles are mine.)
Children’s Emotional Security Act of 2005. A bill was proposed to require employers to give unpaid leave to parents to attend school events. The last I heard, it had been “laid over indefinitely,” which is another way to say “dead.” But bills have come back from that graveyard before, and besides, why stop there?
After all, the state could require parents to attend every concert, play, game, practice and the like. Failure to appear, once work is no longer a valid excuse, will result in an extensive investigation by the relevant county’s social services department, followed by court hearings to determine the full extent of the emotional devastation suffered by a 9-year-old whose parents failed to watch soccer practice.
Previous generations may have attained adulthood and gone on to live productive lives without this emotional protection, but who could now oppose a law which has both “children” and “security” in its title?
Enhanced Motor Safety Law. There was wide support for making the failure to wear a seat belt a “primary offense,” rather than a “secondary offense.”
What’s the difference? If it’s a primary offense, a peace officer can pull you over for that alone. If it’s a secondary, he has to find some other excuse, like a defective tail light, to pull you over, and then he can also cite you for failure to wear a seat belt.
I’m compulsive about wearing my seat belt, and reasonably insistent that passengers buckle up, too. And I realize that society incurs certain costs (somebody has to scrape bodies off the pavement) when people don’t wear seat belts.
But I prefer that the police and state troopers devote their attention to activities that imperil others, rather than seat belt usage. In other words, I want them watching for weavers, speeders, stop-sign ignorers, crosswalk penetrators, red-light runners and other violators who can be seen at a reasonable distance.
After all, if we’re going to criminalize the use or non-use of the equipment inside a car, it’s got to be more dangerous to be on a road near someone whose stereo is blasting “Born to be Wild” or “Bad to the Bone” than someone who isn’t wearing a belt.
And what about a big, insulated mug of road-rage-fueling high-caffeine triple-mocha espresso? These people are a threat to the rest of us, and if we’re going to empower the police to snoop further inside vehicles, that’s where we should start, not with seat belts.
And while they were at it, why didn’t lawmakers think of these two ideas?
Lobbyist Convenience Protection Act. When a House committee held a hearing in Glenwood Springs earlier this year, there were some complaints. The out-of-town location did make it simpler for mere citizens to testify about how they had been affected by oil and gas drilling on their land. But it was inconvenient for the oil and gas lobbyists who were comfortably ensconced at the statehouse.
To protect those beleaguered corporate apologists in the future, there should be a law requiring their permission before any legislative hearing can be held away from the Capitol.
Maximum Stream Flow Harvest Law. Instead of worrying about recreational instream flow rights keeping too much water in our rivers, some legislators could promote this bill, which would set a maximum for each river, and all water in excess of the maximum would be diverted to the Front Range, thereby saving decades of potential litigation.
So, as the session ends, we may be annoyed by some of the laws enacted by our legislature. But we have to be pleased about the many laws they didn’t propose, consider or pass.
Ed Quillen of Salida (ed@cozine.com) is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.
