Now that we’ve passed the funnel, time to legislate

By Iowa City Press-Citizen

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To remain “alive” for the rest of this year's legislative session, most non-budget-related bills needed to have recently passed through the Iowa Legislature's self-imposed legislative funnel.

And because Iowa has a Republican-controlled House and a Democratic-controlled Senate, it's not really surprising that the list of “dead” bills failing to make it through the funnel is very, very, very long.

In fact, this year's legislative session has managed to send very few bills to the governor's desk so far.

At this time last year, in contrast, the session was over. Back then, of course, Democrats had control of both chambers of the legislature and the governor's office and there was pressure on lawmakers to help cut state expenses by keeping the legislative session short. (And given that the voters last year placed both the House and the governor's mansion back in Republican hands, it's clear that a majority of voters disapproved of what the Democrats accomplished in that shortened session.)

No bill is truly “dead” until the session ends. For example, a proposal for imposing a so-called Alaska Carry law in Iowa was supposed to have died in an earlier legislative funnel. Yet the proposal - which would do away with the permit system altogether and allow law-abiding Iowans to carry weapons in public without any background checks or training requirements - managed to resurface as a tax bill and currently is stalled.

The leadership in either house could decide to revive any provision. And lawmakers could try to tack on the proposals in failed bills as amendments to surviving ones.

But barring any such extraordinary efforts on behalf of legislative leaders, we're pleased the legislative gridlock probably means:

- Iowa won't be taking further steps this year to become the first state to legalize and regulate Internet poker. (The bill technically is still alive, but lawmakers intend to amend it to call for merely studying the idea of regulating the game.)

- Iowa's preschool program won't be switching to a needs-based voucher system - which would make preschool unaffordable to many middle-class families - and, instead, will remain free for all 4-year-olds.

- Iowa won't have a huge, Wisconsin-style debate over changing the state's 37-year-old collective bargaining laws with public unions.

- Iowans won't be required to show a photo ID to vote - legislation that was opposed by a bi-partisan coalition of county auditors.

- And Iowa won't move forward this session with efforts to write discrimination into the state's constitution with an amendment that defines marriage as being solely between a man and a woman.

Unfortunately, the next round of the legislative session could be every bit as contentious - even more so - as earlier rounds were. With most of the political-posturing bills now on the cutting room floor, we think it's long past time that state lawmakers get down to hard work of finalizing who gets what money from the state.

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