Legislation for Dummies Could Be A Very Useful Class

Can anybody out there tell Sam and me why we elect people to public office then pay them to be so stupid?

Case in point: a Washington state lady legislator reportedly has sponsored a bill to roll back daylight savings time. The dingbat woman wants to get rid of our extra hour of daylight during the summer time because she says it causes people to lose sleep, to crash their cars more often (because they’re fatigued) and so on. Sam and I find it hard to believe this woman is so dumb, but it was in the newspaper.

Apparently our legislature is rife with dumbness. There’s talk of raising the legal age to smoke those new-fangled vapor cigarettes from 18 to 21. You can still smoke real cigarettes at 18 and go to war at 18 and get killed but, even without the benefit of scientific evidence that vapor might be bad for you, some people are so worried about you getting killed they don’t want vapors clogging up your brain. We guess they think that would make it difficult to see clearly through your gun sites. You can’t get drunk until you’re 21, and you can’t toke up until you’re 21, so maybe you shouldn’t vaporize either.

Those two items remind Sam and me of years ago in California some legislator wanted to require diapers on cows and horses because it offended said legislator to see those animals naked out in fields. A double benefit of making cows and horses wear diapers would have been the ease of picking up behind them. If you’ve ever seen a cow crap, however, you know darned good and well you don’t want to change THAT diaper!

Sam and I think one of the problems with all these goofy bills is that legislators – especially newly elected ones – feel obligated to earn their pay – which is pretty darned good these days. That’s admirable, but we don’t know what’s worse, the do-gooders who want to save the world, and try to pass silly bills accordingly or the ne’re-do-wells who don’t show up for roll call or fall asleep at their desks when they do. Unfortunately, our staties are so busy sponsoring silly legislation they can’t figure out how to adequately finance education or repair our ailing highways and other infrastructure.

Of course our federal legislators operate on an even higher plane of dumb. They pass bills authorizing money for pork barrel projects like bridges that go nowhere (was that Alaska?) or they don’t do anything: healthcare, immigration, gun control. They just sit back and blame our President for trying to do things they won’t. Maybe the problem is the feds can’t think of a way to make their proposed legislation stupid enough. Maybe they should take lessons from our state legislators on how to pass dumb bills. The course could be called Silly Bills for Dummies. Give legislators enough per diem and Sam and I are sure they’d come.