Friday, April 09, 2004
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

EDITORIAL: Some very 'strange bills'

Arnold on the right track embracing part-time legislature

Every session, like clockwork, some gomer goes up to Carson City and proposes the Nevada Legislature should meet every year.

Lawmaking is a serious job, the argument goes. Lawmaking is professional work. Nevada is a fast-growing state -- why, if its population were to double again in the next few decades, it would be almost as big as one of those really big and powerful states, like Alabama or Louisiana.

Besides, it's so old-fashioned having a part-time legislature. It's like being a town with only one gas station -- kind of embarrassing. And who wants our laws made by a motley bunch of ranchers and miners and waitresses and businessmen? They're so parochial -- they're much too slow at requiring Nevadans to behave like a bunch or proper New Yorkers or Californians. I ask you, did you ever see a resident of New York City or San Francisco driving around in a pickup truck with a dog and a shotgun? And the dog not even properly strapped into her seatbelt?

Why, look at how happy the governor of our largest neighbor is with his state's full-time legislature.

Or maybe not.

In fact, California's budget and economy are a national disgrace, as are its mad patchwork of taxes and regulations, which are driving successful businesses away in droves.

And where did all that nonsense come from?

California state lawmakers should work part time so they would be more productive and less likely to write "strange bills," Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger told a reporter during a family vacation in Hawaii this week.

"I want to make the legislature a part-time legislature," he said Tuesday. "Spending so much time in Sacramento, without anything to do, then out of that comes strange bills.

"Give them a short period of time. Then good work gets done ... That's when they start getting creative with things."

That's right. California's popular new governor wishes he had a part-time legislature, like Nevada's.

Interestingly enough, it turns out California's legislature began a year-round work schedule in just 1966, and is one of only four full-time legislatures, along with Michigan, New York and Pennsylvania.

Needless to say, California's Democratic lawmakers were quick to express their ire with Arnold's remarks.

"While I'm out here working ... he's pontificating from Hawaii?" Senate President Pro Tem John Burton, D-San Francisco, asked from Sacramento.

Yes, "working" ... at cobbling together bizarre new tax and bond proposals and banning ferrets and sloths as pets. They just don't get it, do they?

But as long as Gov. Schwarzenegger seems willing to learn some lessons from his smaller neighbors, Nevada should give serious consideration to leading the way with another overdue legislative reform.

The Legislature can continue meeting in Carson City every other year. But in even numbered sessions, it should not be allowed to pass any new laws -- only to repeal bad, useless, counterproductive, and/or out-of-date laws already on the books.

Then, in odd-numbered sessions, our lawmakers would be allowed to enact new laws -- but no more than the number they repealed two years before.