Destroying the dreams of children.

Slate has an article today entitled "New Hampshire Legislators Kill Fourth Graders' Bill, Dreams In Front of Them."  The story concerns how fourth grade students from Hampton Falls, New Hampshire had proposed a bill making the Red Tail Hawk the "State Raptor" for New Hampshire.  The bill apparently sailed out of committee and last week the students attended a session of the New Hampshire House of Representatives where, I assume, the student thought their bill would pass, especially after the representatives gave the kids a round of applause.  But the bill didn't pass.  

More on Wisconsin's state symbols.

Yesterday, I posted the story of how Wisconsin named the American Water Spaniel its official state dog.  Mordecai Lee, one of the players in that story, subsequently emailed me with his thoughts on the post.  I asked Professor Lee for permission to post his email on the blog and he graciously said yes.  I stress that Professor Lee emailed me directly rather than post on the blog.  I don't believe that Professor Lee intended that the email get published here. I think he was just trying to give me some more background for the post. As such, and for reasons that should be obvious, I am sure that Professor Lee is not seeking to have a debate with our Reader(s)™ about something that happened almost 30 years ago.   

Wisconsin state legislators mock children.

For anyone who thinks that Wisconsin's propensity for unpleasant politics is a new thing that resulted from the GOP taking over all three branches of Wisconsin's government last year, I bring you the sad story of how Wisconsin got its official state dog.

The Pitfalls of Style

Occasionally, statutes or codes go through a process of "stylistic revision." The intent is a noble one. Laws are often confusingly or archaically drafted, or both, leaving them sometimes incomprehensible even to trained lawyers. Since the lay public is presumed to know what the law is, laws should be drafted in a way that even the average person can understand them. Stylistic revisions further that goal.

But sometimes laws are hard to understand because they are just complicated, and stylistic revisions can, in an effort to simplify the prose, unintentionally change their meaning—and thus the law!

The understatement of the year (so far).

In a remarkable bit of candor, a member of the Minnesota Senate has admitted that a bill he purportedly authored is "really stupid." According to the Bemidji Pioneer, Republican John Carlson, a freshman senator representing Bemidji, Minnesota, has pulled a bill that would have repealed Minnesota's Pay Equity Act. The Pay Equity Act is eliminates gender-based wage disparities in public employment in Minnesota local governments.

As you might imagine, Senator Carlson’s bill caused a bit of a stir. The Pioneer ran an editorial against the bill and Senator Carlson wrote an op-ed opinion defending it on February 15.

Since his op-ed, Senator Carlson changed his view of the bill. He recently told a group of Minnesota teachers that he pulled the bill. He also apologized for authoring the bill. I am not sure he should have apologized for that since the Pioneer’s article makes it seem like he did not, in fact, author the bill. How does the article do that? By presenting Senator Carlson’s admission that he didn't know what the bill did. Senator Carlson said “What I was told by the League of Minnesota Cities was not to worry about it as it’s not about fair pay for women. It’s about some onerous reporting problems and it costs a lot.” So, because his interest group said that the bill he wanted to repeal was not about pay equity (despite the name of the bill), Senator Carlson just went along with what he was told. It apparently did not occur to him that the cost in question was, you know, paying women as much as men. Nor did it occur to him to check.

To his credit, Senator Carlson admits that he “didn’t do [his] homework very well.” One might suggest, that he did not do his homework at all. However, we should keep in mind that, as Senator Carlson puts it, “When you’re new in the Legislature, the learning curve is unbelievably steep and we honestly don’t know what we don’t know.” I can certainly agree that we often don’t know what we don’t know. However, I would have assumed that the “author” of a piece of legislation might know what his bill actually does.