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A Field Trip to Frankfort - On Cross Country Teams, Photo Ops, Dulcimers, and VET Testing

by Pat Pending

I went to Frankfort, Kentucky this past week to watch our state legislature in action.  The legislators had recently told us that we needed to amend the state's Constitution, because they couldn't get all their important work done in the even-numbered years and needed to meet every year, so I wanted to see what important business they were doing over there. 

The Senate was indeed handling the state's important business, like honoring cross country running teams, letting civic groups take lots of pictures of various people in the front of the legislative chambers while the legislature was in session, listening to live Bluegrass music, and voting to make the dulcimer the state musical instrument.  It must be nice to get paid for doing that kind of stuff.  No wonder they wanted to be able to do that every year!  Well, at least while they were listening to the music they weren't spending more of our money or coming up with more ways to send us to jail!

However, they did get down to more serious business at the very end of the day.  The Senate voted quickly and unanimously to require mothers to have additional screening tests done on their babies.   Apparently, the legislators felt that being elected to office made them suddenly smarter than the doctors who would normally advise the mothers about the screening tests.  The doctors, who have years of training and experience in the field, normally would take into account the cost of the tests, the risks to the baby’s health, and other important factors.  But the legislators obviously realized that being elected to political office made them all much wiser than the doctors and able to make this judgment call and impose it by force of law without even knowing the babies and mothers involved.  Nifty!  Maybe if we could all be elected to political office we could all suddenly become smart enough to be nuclear scientists and brain surgeons!  Beats the heck out of all the time and money required for school and internships!

After the easy votes like forcing infants to take screening tests, the Senate got into some difficult, sticky stuff.  We could tell that, because there were lots of amendments proposed, and some of the legislators, who did not have asterisks by their names on the screen (we figured out they were the Democrats), did quite a bit of whining and complaining about the proposed law.  Apparently, this proposed law would prohibit people from giving money to political campaigns and then landing big contracts with the state – sort of a law to prevent conflicts of interest.  The Republicans said the law was intended to prevent the appearance of impropriety and to prevent shakedowns of businesses by politicians.  But Senator Karem, a non-asterisk senator, said it wasn't fair to wives, who were not chattel.  Chattel is some kind of old legal word that means private property, so now we all know that the bill wasn’t fair, because Senator Karem doesn't own his wife!  Senator Scorsone said the bill wasn't fair because it only excluded contractors, not lobbyists.  The Republicans said Scorsone's proposed amendment was out of order, because it referred to a law number that didn't exist, then they changed their minds and said that error could be corrected if Scorsone would support the bill with that amendment.  And that really made Senator Shaughnessy angry!  Since he and Scorsone were both lacking asterisks beside their names, I thought they would be on the same team and would be glad that the Republicans had changed their mind about tanking Scorsone's amendment, but Shaughnessy was really beside himself complaining about the way things were being done around here these days.  Senator Scorsone also was really angry about elected officials who changed political parties, and he wanted to put in another amendment that would punish anyone in the future who dared to commit such a treasonous act as changing political parties after being elected.  In short, we learned that the people with asterisks by their names were pretty happy, and the people without asterisks by their names were very angry and upset.  My English teacher was right -- what a difference a little punctuation mark can make! 

Later on, we went down into the basement and followed winding, smoke-filled corridors to the Annex, feeling like rats in a maze.  Eventually, we went to a hearing room, where they talked about the Vehicle Emissions Test.  The room was packed with people wearing stickers opposing vehicle emissions testing.  Some were from motorcycle groups and wore black leather vests and lots of tattoos.  Others were in suits.  Only one little boy had on a green sticker that said we should support VET testing to protect his lungs.  He probably had a really hard time making it through the smoke-filled maze to get to the hearing room!

Senator Seum introduced the bill, and Senator Stine also spoke in its favor.  Seum explained that the test was expensive and didn't do any good, and he talked about all the people that had gone to jail under the VET law and other states that had ended their VET programs with no ill effects.  Almost everyone in the room, including the senators from both parties, agreed that the Vehicle Emissions Test was a waste of time and money and did little if anything to clean the air, and they sure wouldn’t want to have it where they lived, but the senators were really worried about what the federal government would do to us if we stopped that test, even though everyone knew that the test didn't do any good.  Apparently, the senators have the idea that the EPA is not a totally rational group.   

An economics professor testified to the committee that, for cars that were model years 1998 and newer, it actually caused more pollution to require the cars to drive to the testing station and take the test than was saved by any cars that were caught in violation of the standards.  Senator Shaughnessy really didn't like hearing that!  He said that, since the economics professor wasn't an expert in air pollution, we should disregard what he had said.  The professor replied that he had just run the government's own numbers to reach his conclusion, which wasn't really hard to do.   Shame on that professor for having the audacity to think that people can add and subtract air pollution numbers without being experts in air pollution.  I suppose he also thinks that people can drive cars without being mechanical engineers!  Come to think of it, if the senators passed a law that only mechanical engineers could drive cars, they could clean up all the road congestion and auto-generated pollution in one fell swoop!

A couple of government experts testified.  It was interesting that they never gave a straight answer to any question they were asked.  One senator asked how long does the pollution stay in the air.  The expert spent about five minutes using lots of big, impressive words without actually answering the question.  When the expert finished, the senator again asked the same question -- how long does the pollution stay in the air?  Again, the expert went around and around without answering the question. I was getting dizzy from all the spinning and, after carefully listening to the answer, I still had no clue whether the pollution stayed in the air for a minute, a day, a year, or fifteen years. It seemed to me that perhaps the expert had spent too much time breathing severely polluted air himself, had perhaps suffered some ill effects from the experience, and might be better off if he would stick to breathing exhaust fumes from 1998 and newer cars. The senator who asked the question must have reached the same conclusion, because he finally apologized to the expert for having asked such a confusing question!

Senator Shaughnessy and another senator said that, no matter how bad or useless the VET program was, they were really sure this was a local issue, and the state should not intrude into local issues.  That would have made more sense if the VET program were not the product of an entanglement of federal, state, and local laws.  It made me wonder how those same senators had voted on things like education, the insurance mandates, and other state intrusions into local and personal matters.  I sure hoped they were consistent and had voted against those, too, but somehow I suspected that they were all for intrusion into local and personal matters on other issues.  (The next day, Sen. Shaughnessy introduced a bill by which the state would prevent Jefferson County and Louisville from entering into any bond debt without 100% agreement of all aldermen and county commissioners until after the merger. It's good to know these guys stand by their principles from one day to the next!)

Well, I don't know what the Senators and Representatives think, but I think it was just fine when they only met every other year!