Hey, hey, ho, ho, sen-a-tors have got to go!
The Alabama Senate has one standing job. ONE JOB.
Yes, it’s charged with other things, like confirming Auburn University trustees. But there’s only ONE THING that it has to accomplish each and every year.
And the State Constitution gives senators 60 days each year to do it.
No, it’s not repealing the state’s sales tax on groceries—although you might think so for all the attention that issue has gotten over the last month.
No, it’s not reforming state campaign finance laws and the PAC-to-PAC transfers that make them a joke—although that issue has been around for so long that it would make sense that it would be an annual responsibility.
It’s passing the state’s budgets.
Among them is the budget that funds Alabama’s public education system from pre-K through university level. You know the education budget: That thing that makes it possible for Alabama’s teachers to be paid, for the lights in the schools to come on, for books and other educational materials, for reading programs and computers and science labs and athletics programs and everything else that comprises state schools.
Yesterday was the last day of the 2008 session.
Did they pass the education budget?
NOOOOOOOOOooooo!!!!!!
For that matter, did they pass the grocery tax repeal?
NOOOOOOOOO!!!
Well, certainly they passed that PAC-to-PAC bill, which everyone agreed during election season two years ago needed to pass. After all, they’ve had long enough to consider it, right???
NOOOOOOOOO!!!!
Nor did they pass many of the more than 170 other bills the House of Representatives, with its 105 members and different sets of opinions, managed to agree on and send to the 35-member Senate.
I can’t wait to see the talking points from the majority and minority offices. Let me guess—it will go something like this:
Republicans will say Democrats filibustered and refused to compromise to pass meaningful legislation for Alabamians. They’re at fault, the GOP will say.
Democrats will say Republicans filibustered and refused to compromise to pass meaningful legislation for Alabamians. They’re at fault, the Democrats will say.
But that’s not to say they won’t agree on some things.
They’ll rush to your community groups and club meetings, eager to remind you about all the pork they’ve managed to haul home in previous sessions and promise more from this summer’s special session. They’ll provide you a laundry list with all the good things their party did—or were precluded from doing because of the cowardly obstructionists on the other side—and all the bad things the other party did—or were kept from doing due only to the great courage and tenacity they displayed.
In short, it will be 30 to 45 minutes of the most self-aggrandizing, self-centered self-promotion that you’re likely to see anywhere (except when your congressman comes to town).
It will almost be enough to make you sick.
Almost.
And that’s why most all of these clowns will be back in 2010: Because Alabamians either have a short memory of wrongs they have suffered at the hands of those who govern them, or they’ve just been abused too much to notice anymore.
It’s just my opinion, of course, but I think that if there isn’t one among them with leadership ability enough to put a stop to all this madness in Montgomery, they all need to go. Let’s throw them all out, thoroughly fumigate the building and start all over.
Why not? What we’ll have then can’t be worse than what we have now.
More on what the failure of the education budget means for Alabama, and what’s coming next, in a little bit ...
... When my blood pressure drops.
