The Legislature didn’t finish a water plan before adjourning the regular legislative session at the end of the week. Perhaps legislators will deal with water in a special session. The prison deal didn’t cover savings projected for the prisons in the recent budget agreement. Perhaps in a special session. The tax commission proposal will soon be presented and the governor wants to deal with it right away. In a special session. And education reforms? A special session is scheduled for that, too.
Taken together, the coming special legislative sessions are looking more and more like a regular session of the legislature. And these sessions hold no promise that they will be more productive than the regular session just completed.
Special sessions of the legislature are supposed to be few and far between. The idea is for the legislature to concentrate on a particular thorny problem and resolve it without the distractions a regular session provides.
But, if one special session is piled upon another, the special session is not special any more. Complex issues are subject to horse-trading and distractions are not minimized.
You can bet the capitol’s recent sex scandal and whispers of a wide spread investigation will still be breathing heavily over the next few months.
One would like to believe that the legislature would get its job done under prescribed deadlines. I know how naïve that sounds given the legislature’s track record on meeting the constitutional mandate of passing a budget.
Regardless, knowing it is a common practice to deal with just about any big problem in a special session, there is less incentive for legislators to confront and deal with problems when they are supposed to.
The possibility of many special sessions leads me to revisit a topic that has been hotly debated on this site recently: the part time legislature. The reason is that even if a part time legislature is established, special sessions could continue legislative sessions well beyond the prescribed shorter session.
The state of Texas regular legislative session is 140 days every other year. But special sessions are often called to exceed that constitutional limitation to deal with specific problems. In fact, Governor Rick Perry called three consecutive special sessions to deal with redistricting in 2003. So the special session issue must be considered when discussing a part time legislature.
As far as California goes, let the legislature do its job when it’s supposed to and leave special sessions for extraordinary and infrequent circumstances. Let’s not call the legislatures back to the capitol so often. I think many Californians subscribe to New York attorney and politician Gideon Tucker’s 1866 aphorism: “No man’s life, liberty or property are safe while the Legislature is in session.”