Responsible lawmakers will step up, quit dodging

In both Olympia and Washington, D.C., this weekend, legislative bodies are straining – despite partisan majorities – to pass measures that are solidly atop their respective priority lists.

If you expect such a configuration of numbers and urgency to show our representative government at its finest, prepare to be disappointed. What we are seeing instead are title-only bills, Slaughter rules and other devices for sidestepping the protocols designed to assure proper checks and balances.

What we are seeing is desperation.

In Olympia, Democratic leadership decided to tackle significant tax-exemption legislation with a mechanism known as the title-only bill, which means just what it implies. The details are filled in at the last minute, thus sidestepping the methodical deliberation that would apply under the conventional protocol of hearings and amendments and floor debate.

In Congress, meanwhile, stymied by complex differences over health care reform, the Democratic majority in the House has concocted a scheme for “deeming” a Senate bill passed while protecting members from the accountability of having to vote on it.

And although the air is thick with partisanship, the main impediment faced by the Democratic majorities in both legislative halls hasn’t been the Republican opposition as much as dissent within the Democrats’ own caucuses.

Is the problem, therefore, endemic to the Democratic Party? Hardly. Republicans’ handling of the Medicare drug benefit legislation in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2003 was a notoriously heavy-handed abuse of the majority they enjoyed at the time.

The customary refrain that others have done it before is no excuse. When elected leaders reject the art of compromise, they divide rather than unite the nation and they intensify public cynicism.

If they want to, majority leaders have a chance to set a respectable precedent by doing it the upright way this time.

Forget the gimmicks; take your votes the standard way. Meritorious measures should pass. Defective ones should be repaired, or turned down. And all elected lawmakers should be able to go home and defend their actions on a clear record of what they did rather than what they managed to avoid.