Full Time Legislature?

Well, swecker’s full time legislature proposal doesn’t rise up to Carl’s level of support for me:

Just to show how bi-partisan I am, here’s a Republican bill I support.

Nope, I still haven’t seen a republican bill I support.

Sen. Dan Swecker made his pitch for a full-time Legislature on Thursday and, although the plan isn’t going anywhere soon, he did find some receptive listeners.
…
“I would like to see the Legislature get more proactive in getting involved in the nitty-gritty details of running the state ,” he said.

What might this really mean? Let’s look at one aspect of the reality of the current legislature:

Sen. Don Benton, R-Vancouver, said he understands Swecker’s concerns, and pointed to the Government Committee agenda for Thursday morning.

“You’ve testified longer than we allow most anybody to testify on anything,” Benton told Swecker. “We’ve got 11 major issues, we get two minutes pro and two minutes con, usually, maybe from one or two panels, and here we are making decisions that will affect 6 million people based on two minutes of testimony.”

To give them all the benefit we can look at this from the perspective of this years 60 day session going full time which will give them 240 days (giving them weekends off). Basic arithmetic suggests that by going full time they will have time to get eight minutes of testimony to form a basis for those major decisions.

Heck, this seems to be a pretty good argument for dramatically reducing the range of things the legislature can do or even eliminating it entirely…and, no, the governor’s office doesn’t get to pick up the slack.