Long List Of Failures For ‘96 Legislature

In one of life’s delicious little coincidences, the front page of Saturday’s Spokesman-Review featured a photograph of three red-nosed clowns alongside a story about the final follies of the 1996 Washington state legislative session.

The entertainers, glowing with brightly colored hair and paintedon grins, were photographed preparing for the Shrine Circus. Meanwhile, beneath the big top in Olympia, legislators were putting on a less endearing show, guzzling lobbyists’ booze and raucously voting on bills few of the lawmakers had read.

In January when the Legislature convened, we expressed a hope that state lawmakers would work to avoid the partisan bickering that paralyzes their counterparts in Congress.

Oh, well.

The chaos, in both capitals, ought to be raising questions among voters who decided in the last election to embrace a crew of novice politicians who said they didn’t care about getting re-elected and disliked government along with most of its endeavors.

But compromise, essential to the enactment of needed reform, has proved unattainable. Confusing obstructionism with statesmanship, true believers in both political parties have spent the winter casting votes for and against plainly unpassable legislation whose purpose was election-year posturing rather than progress in public policy.

The 1996 Legislature did make a few good moves. It provided funds for an additional 2,780 students to enroll in Washington’s dangerously undersized colleges and universities. It trimmed business taxes. It refrained from deeper tax cuts that would have left the state unable to cope with a likely withering of federal funding for important state programs such as Medicaid.

But the list of failures is long and important. Legislators failed to reform welfare and the massively inefficient Department of Social and Health Services. They sold out patients’ interests to price- and benefit-gouging health insurance companies. While they conjured up millions they didn’t really have to buy Seattle a nicer baseball stadium, they refused to spend money they did have on valid projects elsewhere, including Spokane. Juvenile justice laws, long in need of reform, fell victim to a game of political football. And in a burst of last-minute largess, legislators bulked up a decent plan for a higher education computer network, adding unsought millions that somehow or other will link the network to non-existent or obsolete computers in the state’s kindergarten through grade 12 schools.

Final grade for the session? D-plus, with extra credit for giving up and going home.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Webster/For the editorial board