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Georgia legislature running out of time on key issues

April 12, 2010 — During the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama revived a phrase from the Rev. Martin Luther King’s 1963 Lincoln Memorial speech: “the fierce urgency of now.” If there was ever a time for that impatient emotion to prevail under the Golden Dome, this would seem to be it.

With seven legislative days left, the House and Senate are still at odds over the hospital provider fee, the chief roadblock to the passage of the budget. House Speaker David Ralston says he will rule as non germane the amended bill in which the Senate, right before the spring break, linked the fee with business tax cuts. There’s a parliamentary path by which the two chambers can still approve the provider fee and pass a budget, but the lawmakers haven’t left themselves much margin for error. The consequences, especially for the state’s hospitals, are enormous.

Senate Appropriations Chairman Jack Hill (R-Reidsville) last week used the analogy of building a railroad from opposite sides of the country to describe the task ahead for the two chambers. The two sides could start out energetically from the coasts, he said, “and still miss each other by a mile.”

With seven days left, the transportation funding bill also remains in limbo, conjuring unhappy memories of the futile, last-minute efforts to get this measure accomplished in the closing hours of last year’s session and the one before.

The fate of the ethics bill – which was to be the signature legislation of this new-brush session – is in doubt as well. So at this late stage, the chief accomplishment of this session has been the passage of a water bill that had the fierce urgency of a federal court ruling to give it the impetus to make it over the finish line.

Ralston said in the  Atlanta Journal-Constitution Sunday that if the pace of this session has been slower, it’s due to the enormity of the economic downturn this legislature is dealing with.

There’s a lot of truth to this. If nothing else, the management of this session has been more sober than the last couple, and the budgetary challenges have indeed dwarfed anything this generation of legislators has seen.

But it may also be the case that a legislative calendar that made sense under previous conditions no longer does, in the strained circumstances in which the state finds itself. Increasingly over the past few years, the first part of each year’s session has become a delaying action, as legislators wait for monthly revenue reports or federal action to complete their budgetary duties.

These delays affect more than just the budget, because they undermine the fierce urgency of now.

It used to be that a lot of major issues would be put off until the closing days, but sufficient groundwork would have been laid by then for a fairly quick resolution of the remaining differences. These days there are considerably fewer bills, but there often seems to be less preparation.

When the big bills really got rolling in the final days of a session, legislators used to make whistle noises to signify the measures being railroaded through. For better and worse, that train doesn’t stop at the Capitol any more. The lawmakers will need every minute of the time still allotted to them to accomplish a scrap of what they set out to do.

And without some fierce urgency, that won’t be enough.