Editor's note: Mike Doogan is an Alaska State House Representative, author and former newspaper columnist. This commentary appeared in his legislative e-newsletter on March 30.
Thomas Jefferson we aint
Welcome to constitutional amendment week. Please don your powdered wig and listen up.
I'm not a big fan of constitutional amendments. Some of them, like the one establishing a right to privacy, are great. The jury is still out on others, like the Alaska Permanent Fund. Still others, the one outlawing same-sex marriage, for instance, are a stupid mistake.
My father was one of the 55 people who wrote the Alaska Constitution, so maybe I'm just being protective. But the two we are dealing with are very, very bad ideas.
One of them, House Joint Resolution 4, would allow the creation of a separate fund to pay for transportation projects. Now, transportation projects are fine things, and the state and federal budgets pay to build them every year. But with the federal budget starting to shrink, and oil production falling off year after year, the people who make their livings building them and using them are starting the get antsy.
Enter Peggy Wilson, a Rep from Southeast, who authored three bills to make sure the dough keeps flowing. One of them is HJR 4.
I don't like it for two reasons. One is that dedicated funds limit the Legislature's maneuvering room when the state's finances start to go gunny-sack. The plan is to lock away $1 billion for transportation. Even around here, $1 billion is real money. Locking it up may not be the best idea.
The second is that, if this maneuver is successful, what next? Dedicated funds for education? For health care? For a polka band college?
So I got up on the House floor on Thursday and made this case. The result of my clear thinking and witty repartee was a 30-7 decision. I was one of the 7.
What's left is an even worse idea, HJR 16, which would divide up the education budget and let people take their share and spend it on whatever strikes their fancy. Charter schools? Sure. Religious schools? You bet. Schools dedicated to the idea that parents would never have to go thirsty again? Why not?
The bill is the brain child of Rep. Wes Keller, in collaboration with a cluster of right-wing zealots called ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council. Apparently what its members exchange are ideas that take the country back to 1910, where they can light cigars with $100 bills and sweat the workers. Destroying American education seems to be part of the grand plan.
As I write this, the fate of HJR16 is unknown. Perhaps you'll know later in the day. Maybe sanity will prevail. But given our record so far, that's not the way to bet.
Number Nine Number Nine Number Nine
On Tuesday night, stretching into early Wednesday morning, the House passed House Bill 9 (an in-state gas pipeline bill) by a 27-12 margin – all but one Democrat voting against and all but one Republican voting in favor. Don't ask me to explain. We began the debate at 6 p.m., and we wrapped it up a little after 1 a.m. I'd like to say it was seven hours of stimulating, lively debate, but it was more like an unending verbal bludgeoning. I went in being a big fan of the English language. I came out wishing I was more fluent in Swahili.
I'm not going to say nothing good came from the debate. One legislator enlightened us that you have to do number one before you can do number two. It turns out this can be useful information in a number of contexts, so we got at least that much out of the discourse – but that's pretty much all we got. The rest of the debate was amateur theatre and cheap suits.
Now, don't get me wrong. I'm perfectly happy to burn the midnight oil doing the people's business, but listening to seven hours of speeches that somehow managed to be simultaneously passionate and dull, only to achieve a foregone conclusion when the votes are tallied has always struck me as a little absurd.
In the end, as is too often the case, we sent what I think is an iffy piece of legislation on its merry way to the Senate. The good news is you don't have to be Edgar Cayce to know where it's going from there. The Senate greeted HB 9 by assigning it to three committees – with about 17 days to go in session that bill has as good a chance of making it to the Senate floor as Frosty the Snowman has of winning the Baja 1,000. But sometimes even the seemingly impossible happens in Juneau.
Just the Facts
Four in 10 people, at some point in their lives, will become allergic to chocolate. Shocking statistic, isn't it?
That's because I made it up.
OK, stop googling "chocolate allergy vaccine" for a second so I can tell you why I did.
It's been something of an Education Week in the powerful House Finance Committee. Teachers, school board members, superintendents and concerned citizens have been packing the committee room while we hear presentations about education issues in Alaska.
Now, I'm no figures filbert, nor am I a stickler for fully-footnoted Powerpoint slides, but generally when someone makes an assertion in Finance, they back it up with some modicum of verifiable evidence.
Example: The human head weighs eight pounds. --The kid from Jerry Maguire. (Not hard, right?)
On Wednesday, Finance met to hear testimony on "school choice" from the Alaska Policy Forum – a self-proclaimed "conservative think tank." Now, I have no problem listening to all points of view on a subject as complex as education, but if you're going to make bold claims about the failures of public education, those claims had better be backed up with facts. Especially if you bill yourself as an organization which thinks – in some sort of tank, I guess.
Instead, the presentation we got was light on numbers and heavy on bullet points with buzzwords like "mission creep" and "competition" and, believe it or not, "education fund dividend." (I suppose saying "private school voucher" is just so '90s.)
I asked the presenter, who seemed like a perfectly nice individual, if he could back up any of his sweeping claims.
He couldn't. Instead, he regurgitated his red-meat talking points. At that point, I surmised that he didn't have any facts to give, and that debating him would just be a giant waste of everyone's time. Because, without facts, who's to say what's correct and what isn't?
So, if you ever present to the House Finance Committee (and, if you do, my condolences), please remember one thing:
Just the facts, please.
Now, can you name the three words in the English language which start with the letters "dw"?
The views expressed here are the writer's own and are not necessarily endorsed by Alaska Dispatch. Alaska Dispatch welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, e-mail commentary(at)alaskadispatch.com.