Wednesday, December 13th, 2006...7:09 am
A New Era of Bipartisan Cooperation…Wait, Never Mind
The best system is to have one party govern and the other party watch. - Speaker Thomas Bracket Reed
It seems that the Republican leadership at the legislature is already being punitive toward Democratic members. There has already been talk that their offices may be moved from the third floor of the capitol, where most of them had offices last session, to a lower floor. Many of them are seeing this as more symbolic of how they will be treated by the majority party rather than anything substantive. Insulting, but it won’t effect the job that they do.
The more substantive complaint regards the make up of committees. In the last session, committees were 5-3. In this session, where the ratio of the whole house went from 39-21 to 33-27, the ratio will still be 5-3. Incoming Democratic Whip Steve Gallardo has been publicly demanding a 5-4 ratio on the committees, saying that he will “go to war” otherwise. Steve, you know that the Speaker will make sure that any war resolution gets assigned to a committee where it will go down 5-3.
Even optimistic Republicans who point to the victory of Jon Kyl and some conservative-minded initiatives must, at the very least, say that the results for them were mixed given their loss of legislative seats and the wide margin for Janet Naoplitano and Terry Goddard. Shouldn’t the organization of the legislature reflect that?
It looks like we are in for an escalation of what we saw last session: ignore the Democratic members, ignore the Governor, pass things that you know will get vetoed, gripe when they get vetoed, then pass them again and be shocked when they get vetoed again. Oh, and when it is all over, blame the Democrats for being either ineffective or obstructionist.
And these guys wonder why they didn’t get that pay hike?
NB - A reader wrote taking issue with some of my assertions in this post. I addressed these in a subsequent post.
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