Reject House’s attempt to revive budget bobtailing

AT ITS WORST (as far as anyone knows), the Legislature’s practice of tacking separate laws onto the tail of the state budget produced the clandestine legalization of video poker and a bribery-tainted, retroactive tax break for a select few.

More commonly, it resulted in laws that everybody knew about but that didn’t have enough support to pass on their own. They were attached to the budget, and opponents ordered to swallow them or else risk shutting down state government — and lose all those special little perks in the budget that they wanted.

Those abuses led the Republican leadership of the House and Senate, once they controlled both bodies, to agree to put an end to bobtailing or logrolling or whatever you want to call this blackmail maneuver.

That agreement had a slow start, but it seemed to be working until last year, when House leaders used a different procedure to achieve the same goal, refusing even to negotiate the state budget until the Senate acquiesced on a separate bill that masqueraded as “reform” of the Transportation Department.

Last week, they laid aside the pretense and declared bobtailing season open, adding four separate new laws to the budget bill. They didn’t even try to hide their arm-twisting intentions; Speaker Bobby Harrell explained that this was part a strategy so he could use the budget to pressure the Senate into passing those separate laws.

This would be an intolerable way to advance good ideas — and one of the add-ons actually is a good idea. It’s even worse because three are decidedly bad ideas, morally bankrupt ideas that are being pushed, quite cynically, by an election-year Republican Caucus that cares more about bragging rights than sound policy.

Why cynical? Because all three measures, passed in a year when the budget of nearly every state agency is being cut, when the Legislature can’t even find money to put gas in the school buses, would cut into the Legislature’s ability to fund the government — in the future.

One of these stand-alone laws would take revenue from the sales tax on cars out of the general fund and give it to the Transportation Department — $1 million this coming year, and an additional $30 million in each successive year.

Another would cut income taxes — for married couples. The first, very small, cut would come this year, with larger cuts in succeeding years.

The third would slap an arbitrary cap on the amount of money the Legislature can spend in future years to run government. Supporters say it’s not arbitrary because it allows spending to grow by the rate of inflation plus population growth. But that’s only if the combined number is less than 6 percent. If it’s more, then it will be against the law even to maintain the same level of services year over year.

Oh, and that good idea that the House has inappropriately tied to the budget? It’s just as cynical as the bad ones. It’s to extend the life of the endowed chairs program that is transforming our economy, but that is by law set to expire in 2010. But on the same day representatives tacked this to the budget bill, they voted to cut funding for the program next year.

Dealing with these bobtails should be the easiest thing the Senate has ever done: It should reject them out of hand, and put the burden on the House to explain why it is petulantly holding up the budget and using video-poker-style political ploys to blackmail the Senate, and the state, into doing its bidding.