Sunday, Aug. 03, 2008

It’s a tough job, but somebody’s gotta do it

AT LEAST once a week — usually more often — someone complains to me about the Legislature’s inability to pass a cigarette tax or outlaw payday lending or eliminate the pork or ... you name it. It’s so easy, they invariably say. Anyone could do it — except those doofuses at Assembly and Main.

That idea was summed up perfectly in a delightful article in The Post and Courier: “Ease off those guys, legislatin’ is hard.” The article, recounting the ridiculous activities that consume our lawmakers’ thoughts and time, was inspired by last month’s meeting of the House education funding study committee, which, like practically every meeting there has ever been of a legislative panel looking into broad tax or spending reform, featured much speechifying and no hope of any sort of agreement on anything.

Yet despite the sarcastic intent of the article, despite the understandable frustration of voters, the fact is that legislatin’ is hard, particularly when it involves something as important and complicated as changing the maze of formulas that determine where the state’s $3.5 billion in public school funding goes.

The problem isn’t coming up with a plan. It’s coming up with a plan that can pass.

Give me all the relevant information, and I could come up with a better way to distribute school funds. I might find the decisions painful — you have to either raise taxes or make huge cuts in other parts of government or reduce the funding to better-off school districts, in order to get adequate funding to the poor districts full of hard-to-educate poor kids — but I could do it.

Give that same task to another reasonably informed person, and he could come up with a plan.

Even if that other person and I had the same goals and similar philosophies, our plans would be different. But as long as we both were sincere, we could work out a compromise.

Expand the number of plan drawers to, say, five, and we could still reach an agreement. A dozen of us probably could.

But now divide those people into separate philosophical camps, with hugely different beliefs about how to accomplish the goal, or even about what the goal should be: Low taxes are the top priority for this group, covering the extra costs of educating poor kids for that group, ensuring wealthy districts don’t lose anything for this other group.

Then expand the number of people drawing up plans to 124. Throw in a separate group of 46. And try to get both of those groups to agree to a plan. Then get them to agree to the same plan. Now add one person who can veto their plan if he doesn’t like it — and the veto sticks unless two-thirds of the 124 and two-thirds of the 46 support the plan.

It’s still doable — and it gets done nearly every day the Legislature is in session — if the issue being addressed has a small enough number of variables, or if it’s complicated and obscure enough that most legislators give up on trying to understand it, and if there’s no great philosophical divide about how best to accomplish it — or whether it should be accomplished.

(With two negotiators, a lot of individual elements makes it easier to reach an agreement, because there’s more to trade off. With dozens of negotiators, it makes getting anything done exponentially more difficult, because of the opportunity to form coalitions in support of individual elements. With tax policy, for example, every one of the scores of tax exemptions has at least one legislative supporter, each of whom will support somebody else’s exemption in return for his supporting her exemption.)

Next, stir in the Legislature’s operating rules: The committee in charge of a bill can keep the full House or Senate from debating it, even if it has widespread support. A single senator can keep the Senate from debating a bill unless at least half of the senators vote to make it a priority, ahead of their priorities; and even then, that one senator can prevent a vote unless more than half of his colleagues are willing to publicly tell him to shut up.

Now add in a few people who don’t want to change anything, but pretend they do, and insist on elements that are really designed to make others oppose the plan.

To this, add legislators’ desire to get re-elected, and their worry about how one tiny piece of the bill might be twisted and used against them in a campaign.

Finally, add in the special interests with a stake in one of those tiny elements, or in the overall plan. Some of those interests represents hundreds or thousands of real people, voters, who will let legislators know what they think, and potentially vote against them. Some represent campaign donations, which can be given to incumbents or to their opponents. Some represent huge independent campaigns that will be waged for or against legislators.

You might think those last two elements are irrelevant, that our problem is that lawmakers worry too much about getting re-elected and not enough about serving the best interests of the state, at least as they see them.

Fine, take those elements out. You’re still left with a Herculean task. And I don’t envy legislators one bit.

But here’s the thing: When it comes to fixing the way we fund the public schools, it’s a task that must be completed. And our legislators are the people who volunteered for the job. If they’re not up to it, they need to let someone else try. Just don’t tell that someone else that it’s going to be easy.

Ms. Scoppe can be reached at cscoppe@thestate.com or at (803) 771-8571.