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Last Sunday morning on the ABC-TV highbrow gabfest - This Week, host George Stephanopoulos interviewed Speaker of State Nancy Pelosi. During the interview, Stephanopoulos broached the issue of the Speaker’s “first 100 hour agenda” and how few of the things she talked about accomplishing last year while she was on the campaign trail actually came to fruition. He followed this point by asking Ms. Pelosi whether or not she was concerned that the 110th might be viewed as a “do nothing Congress?”

The Speaker (who usually doesn’t do very well when put on the spot - have you ever seen one of those painful to watch fingernails across the chalkboard press conferences she holds?) answered the question in stride and blamed the president for not allowing issues like the war in Iraq to move forward. As for ethics problems and other house management issues she said, “I said it would take a woman to clean House, we’re draining the swamp.”

Yeah, but what about not getting anything done? Or at least anything of substance accomplished.

I make this point because I’m getting tired of watching our legislators (both at the federal and state levels) act really busy -

• At the federal level they’ve had lots of “non-binding” resolutions, awarding of medals, designating of coins, honoring former members and the renaming of federal buildings (which also was a trademark of the previous regime), all that for the $165,200 we pay each member annually
• At the state level in Ohio our elected officials are so busy putting strippers out of business and ramming bad Cable TV legislation down our throats that they barely bothered to look at the governor’s budget before they passed it - of course they had to do that so that they could get their staffers pay increase in without delay

…but in reality accomplish nothing.
Gee what else are we paying these guys (and gals) to (not) do?

In the old days, the federal legislature only operated for a limited period (the thinking was that travel to and from the capitol took so long) and that when in Washington only the necessary business would be done. This forced elected representatives to do the nation’s business Instead of grandstanding on issues just to make a political point, or reading into the record the name of a constituent who mows his lawn every week (and just happens to be a big donor).

Most states are meant to have “part-time” legislatures whose members are supposed to have real jobs (the idea being that government should be a duty, not a career), but instead they are becoming full-time occupations for more and more people in state government. In Ohio our legislative schedule once mirrored the agrarian calendar - citizen legislators had a crop to plant and tend to between April and October, so the bulk of the state’s business was done between January and March. Now days about the same level of work is getting done, but it now requires them 9 months to do so, because they’re spending time on the important stuff like pole dancing and ensuring that children across the state can get their MTV.

Who needs legislators?

Maybe the thing to do is go for pure, direct democracy. Our representative democracy doesn’t seem to be doing anything of substance, why not institute an online referendum process and let the citizenry vote directly on these issues. SB16 is a perfect example of a law that was introduced and pushed by a citizens group - the legislators and the governor were only capitulating to the people.

So I ask you again, who needs legislators?

Apparently, we don’t.