Commentary

Surprise! Legislature adjourns with work undone

Our Alaska Legislature wound down its special session with no bang and barely a whimper. I know you're all shocked to find out that the Legislature has still been in session. The silence emanating out of Juneau during this last special session is a perfect encapsulation of the Legislature's complete failure.

Not that they haven't accomplished anything. They've done the bidding of their industry overlords and made sure that while education, health care, children and the elderly pay for the crash in oil prices, their real constituents feel no pain. They get their subsidies. Meanwhile, Alaska faces downgraded credit ratings, an almost empty budgetary reserve and a fairly bleak financial future, all because it's an election year and the ins want to stay in.

You'd think for the amount of money these turkeys have been pulling down while their session stretched on endlessly that they would have come up with at least one or two decent ideas for what to do with our current fiscal crisis. Instead, it seems as though the time was spent taking positions that tried to straddle the great divide between what industry wanted and what their constituents needed. The oil lobbyists have clearly won this skirmish. As for the war, we barely have any ammo left to fight it.

I have to question how these people keep their jobs when they don't do the one major task on their plate. They posture and pose and blame it on the other guy, the other party. Let's be real here. Everyone is to blame. But whether they like it or not, the majority of the blame falls on the majority party that has a choke hold on the Legislature. They seemed incapable of compromising or making the hard decisions. In fact, the only thing some legislators seemed capable of doing is making sure the oil industry will fund their re-election bids this fall by doing everything asked of them.

These politicians currently congratulating themselves on passing a budget that relies on practically emptying the Constitutional Budgetary Reserve claim that fixing Alaska's financial woes is hard, complicated work that can't be done overnight. Well, duh! We knew that. And they knew that going into this session. They knew it from last session. They knew it from the time the price of a barrel of oil dropped under $50. They promised us when they were begging for our votes that they were the ones capable of putting Humpty Dumpty back together again. They lied. Watching the convoluted twists and turns of the past few months in Juneau it has become clear to most Alaskans with even half a brain that the only thing these legislators are capable of is lining their own pockets by making sure their bosses don't have to feel the pain.

So now we're at a point where next year's Legislature will face an almost empty savings account and no path to a future of financial solvency. These politicians will come home to campaign on the platform that they cut the budget and next year will finally get around to creating a realistic fiscal plan. They sound like kids with a reading list for summer who wake up one day and find that it's Labor Day and they haven't even started. So they promise their mom they'll do better next year but there is simply not enough time to accomplish the reading before school starts.

They will blame the other guys, whether those other guys are the governor, the Democrats or moderate Republicans, for holding up all their brilliant ideas. In case you weren't paying attention, those brilliant ideas mostly sounded like giving money to the oil companies as well as giving them our oil while making sure Alaskans remain hungry, cold and illiterate. Great plan.

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Governor Walker has called for yet another special session. The good news is that this will dramatically cut down on the amount of campaign crap filling our mailboxes and voicemail message boxes. The bad news is that they will still be collecting per diem and expenses. If they had any shame at all, they wouldn't take it.

H.L. Mencken once said, "No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public." If Alaskans vote this car full of clowns back into office this fall, they will prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was absolutely right.

Elise Patkotak's book "Coming Into the City" is available at AlaskaBooksandCalendars.com and at local bookstores.

The views expressed here are the writer's own and are not necessarily endorsed by Alaska Dispatch News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary@alaskadispatch.com. Send submissions shorter than 200 words to letters@alaskadispatch.com or click here to submit via any web browser.

Elise Patkotak

Elise Patkotak is an Alaska columnist and author. Her book "Coming Into the City" is available at AlaskaBooksandCalendars.com and at local bookstores.

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