Camden: How to get the Legislature out of Dodge on time

The lawmakers often make a show of refusing their per diems, but in fact they aren’t required to file for them, so it’s a passive, not an active, refusal.

To hit them in the pocketbook, it would be necessary to deduct a day’s pay for each day spent in special session.

This could have some impact, particularly for the majority of legislators who do not spend most of a special session in Olympia. They’re back at home with family, working at whatever other job they have, waiting for a summons from their leadership to return for votes on deals that have been struck.

A relative handful have been in Olympia for much of the first and second special sessions; if the remainder back home were getting their paychecks docked, they might pressure their leaders to reach a deal.

But that assumes legislators are motivated chiefly by money, and the majority are not.

Those who want to make more money usually find more lucrative employment as lobbyists or consultants in the private sector. Money alone won’t get them to finish on time.

Structural change needed

The real solution must be structural for this part-time Legislature. (Some suggested this year that Washington needs a full-time Legislature; yeah, like it needs a year-round sinus infection.)

An odd-year session like this one, in which the state’s two-year budget is written, is set at 105 days by law.

But those days run consecutively from the time the first gavel bangs in January until late April. Legislators almost never do official work like committee hearings or floor debate on Saturday or Sunday. Yet those days count against the total, so those 105 days, practically speaking, automatically are reduced by 28 percent.

Rather than extend the number of days in a session, it might make more sense to cut them to 90 but only count weekdays, and build in a two-week break after day 45.

Most legislators could go home, hold town hall meetings, talk to constituents, and reconnect with families while budget leaders and their staffs draft budgets that would be available to the public by the time the full Legislature returns.

Make each chamber vote its budget out of committee by the end of the second week, off the floor by the end of the third, then begin negotiations to resolve the differences while the rest of the Legislature tries to pass non-budget items.

That would lead up to a session ending in late May.

But we did not have a budget by late May this year, you might argue. And there’s no guarantee a schedule change would fix that.

So, to avoid the specter of a government shutdown at that point, the state would need another provision that says if there’s no budget by May 31, all current programs continue into the next year, but no new programs, policies or pet projects get a dime.

Legislators could then go back to their home districts and explain that to their constituents. Then we could see how fast they settle on a budget in January of the following year, which for all of the House and half the Senate would be an election year.