Lawmakers' Pounding Legislative Hangover

One of the signs that you have a real substance problem is that you start having blackouts. You wake up in a Beefeater's uniform, clutching a pink and green pinwheel and a heavily underlined copy of "Naked Lunch" … and having no idea of how this came to pass.

So it goes with the big sloppy untreated drunk we call the General Assembly.

Twice last week, its members revealed that they had passed laws they did not understand and for reasons that would not withstand even the faintest scrutiny.

On Tuesday, state Rep. Stephen Dargan said he did not know when Connecticut's newest legal game of chance — keno — would be implemented or how many locations would offer it or how much money it would bring in. Or anything.

This is especially troubling because Dargan chairs the Public Safety Committee, which oversees all gaming legislation. But keno did not go through any committee. It somehow became a law in the middle of the night near the end of the session. In fact, they passed the keno law pretty much the way people will play keno: in a fit of late-night, vodka-soaked abandon with poor impulse control and scant grasp of the immediate financial future.

A day later, there was a meeting of the Task Force to Consider the Balance Between Victim Privacy and the Public's Right to Know. That's really the name of the task force. Apparently nobody thought it was too long.

At that meeting, state Sen. Len Fasano explained why the legislature, in a hurry during the last days of the session, passed a bill preventing public and press access to all police homicide photos. Fasano said a "high profile" person was seeking the release of all the Newtown crime scene photos for some kind of exploitive purpose. After the meeting, he told CTNewsjunkie reporter Hugh McQuaid the high profile person was filmmaker Michael Moore.

Fasano said the law was a "stopgap" to deal with this desperate situation and that everybody understood its imperfections would be ironed out later.

In fact, the real name of the 17-member panel should be the Task Force to Fix a Really Stupid and Backward (But Sweeping) Law That Was Passed With Less Consideration Than Is Given to the Average Sofa Purchase. But if you called it that, the work of the task force would expand to include so many other laws! Including keno legalization!

And of course, none of that Michael Moore stuff is true, as far as anybody can discern. He didn't ask for the photos. They are not part of any exploitive project he has on the drawing board. He has written about the power such photos can have in swaying public opinion, but he has also said the Newtown photos should never be released without the consent of the parents.

What is wrong with this law was explained bluntly and eloquently by journalist Jim Smith, another member of the TFCBBVPPRK. "In a democracy, it is wrong to hide information about crimes from the public."

Yes. It is wrong to do that.

And Smith put it so simply that even a legislator could understand it.

Here lies the paradox. Although there are some very bright legislators, collectively, the General Assembly is of below average intelligence. I'm pretty sure that if you randomly generated a list of 187 citizens and told them to report for duty, you'd increase the wattage, if you know what I mean.

If they were smart, would they try to do 80 percent of their work in 6 percent of their time year after year, never comprehending the connection between their workflow and the mediocrity of their output?

So it's extra, extra, extra important to explain things to them very carefully. "Explain as you would to a child," says the evil Sarris in "Galaxy Quest."

Not only should there be hearings on keno legalization and rollbacks of basic access to public records, but those hearings should be conducted in the manner pioneered in 40 years ago by the "Children's Television Workshop." Simple language. Lots of examples.

I'm proposing that no law should be passed until every legislator understands what it is. I know. Call me a dreamer.


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