Budget bragging rights await victor of legislative struggle

This from Bill Bartleman at the Paducah Sun (subscription):

Let the games begin.

The annual sessions of the Kentucky legislature are a lot like professional sports. There’s the long regular season and then a short tournament season when the games really count.

The regular season of the 2008 session is essentially over. What happened during the first 11 weeks has set the stage for the political tournament that begins Monday. The success of the session will be determined over the next seven days when lawmakers work at a rapid pace to negotiate differences on key legislation and pass or officially
kill bills that have been lingering since the first gavel fell on Jan. 8.

This year, lawmakers are going to be fighting with the aggressiveness of ice hockey players. If you’ve ever seen a hockey game, you know there’s a lot of tripping and fighting with occasional bloody noses and teeth being knocked out.

Legislative fighting is about partisan politics. It is about House Democrats versus Senate Republicans. It is wins and losses for the political party.

The biggest battle is going to be over the budget. House Democrats will fight for higher taxes with only a few budget cuts and the Senate Republicans for a budget without tax increases but with cuts in programs.

Like athletes trying to gain a psychological advantage, there’s already been a lot of trash talk. Senate President David Williams last week accused House budget committee chairman Harry Moberly of violating ethics laws by using his influence to fund programs for his employer, Eastern Kentucky University.

Moberly fired back by calling Williams an egomaniacal dictator and said he was lying about past secret budget negotiations.

As a result, House
and Senate leaders have reluctantly agreed to hold this year’s negotiations in public, a far cry from two years ago when hallways leading to the committee room were blocked and guarded by Kentucky State Police troopers. They also covered committee room windows so that no one could see what was going on.

The Senate will pass its version of the budget on Monday and negotiations will begin
Tuesday. Holding the talks in public will slow the negotiations and make it more difficult to have an agreement by April 1, the end of the bill-passing portion of the session.

With the public and press watching, negotiators won’t engage in the wheeling and dealing that takes place when the doors are closed.

Heaven forbid, with the public watching they’ll have to exert some statesmanship. But don’t expect that to last long. Public negotiations are likely to break down early in the process with one side or the other staging a walkout. They’ll lock their hockey sticks over whether taxes should be increased to prevent cuts.

Efforts to settle the budget issues eventually will resort to the privacy of telephone calls or meetings in back rooms of the Capitol Building.

I still think there’s better than a 50-50 chance the session will end without a budget. House and Senate leaders, however, won’t blame it on a stalemate but will say it is being delayed until a special session in June so they have a better handle on revenue estimates for the next two years.

Another major fight will be over ethics reform legislation. It also is facing uncertainty. But the understandable is understandable because ethics means doing what is right. The partisan political fighting over the budget and other issues isn’t doing what’s right. To really reform their ethics, lawmakers will need to reform the way they do business.