One thing about the legislation in Albany always has been that it could be safely ignored. For the most part our distinguished representatives appear twice a year: in the fall when they run for reelection and in the spring when they’re taking turns arguring with the governor as to who is causing the budget to be late. Between these two seasons, excepting for an occasional pop-up in the local news when they are pushing some sort of pet project in an attempt to get reelected, they tend to disappear.
Not this year.
Seems the Republicans were unable to come to terms with the fact that, after thirty some years, they had lost their majority in the State Senate. (That it happened last fall and took them nearly seven months to realize this before trying to do something to regain control, comes as no surprise.) At any rate the Republicans came up with a plan whereby they could regain control by bringing a couple of dissatisfied Democrats into their fold (given this is NYS, finding dissatisfied Democrats is just a matter of throwing a rock in any direction. Plus they picked a couple of good ones; one is being investigated for misappropation of funds and the other is under indictment for slashing his girl friend. Do we elect solid citizens or not?). The carrot for this seems to have been promising one of the Democrats, Pedro Estrada, that he would be tempory president of the Senate under this new coalition. (Hey, Pedro, the word is “tempory” how long to do think you’ll hold this position once a couple more Republicans are elected?) Rather than do this last fall when there wasn’t a helova lot of legislation to do, they picked the end of the session to create this brouhaha, effectively ceasing any kind of legislative progress that might have been done before they take their extended summer vacation (and gear up for the fall elections). I especially like the reasoning: The Republicans needed to get control because the current, Democratic-led Senate was not getting anything done. Yeah, right, like they aren’t going to be embroiled in a “He said/ He said” legal fight from now until the end of the session. Plus, of course, the previous 30+ Republican-led Senates weren’t exactly task oriented.
For a long time I’ve felt that there needs to be something done to reduce the number of idiots in the legslative branch of the govenment. To my way of thinking, the best way to do this as well as cut the cost of government was very simple; just double the number of people each State Representative and Senator needed to represent. This would simply slash the number of people in both bodies in half. Not only would the cost drop by at least a third(yeah, a third because those left would need more money) but, hopefully, with twice the number running maybe we’d get a real choice. At least it would retire half of the incumbents that have held the same office for years. When you stop to think about it, the district sizes are formed using arbitrary numbers arrived at back in a time when travel and communication were a problem. In this day of airplanes, helicopters, Interstate highways, television, computers, Twitter, Facebook and whatever, anyone that is interested can be instantly in contact with anyone, anywhere. Any legislator could just as effectively represent 2 people as 1 and their job could easily be down-sized. Of course this would require a change in the state constitution but it would be doable. It could also work for the US House of Representatives as well. All that is needed is someone to get the ball rolling.