WASHINGTON – The nation’s newest reality television star, Gov. Matt Bevin, appears to be following the example set by a media darling from another era – Major Frank Burns, of M*A*S*H*, a bumbling dilettante who immediately decides, based on thin air, that he is the smartest guy in the room and then has to rely on others to clean up the mess he has created.
Bevin, who captured the high office based on a 30 percent turnout of registered voters who embraced his myopic, Tea Party ways last November, has quickly established he knows darn little about the commonwealth he has been selected to serve or how the wheels of said government operate, providing the public with an embarrassing display of his limitations, which are numerous.
Annoyed that the Kentucky General Assembly, in the midst of its 60 day legislative session, had yet to heel to his budgetary whims, Bevin decided to become a man of action in hopes of humiliating the 100-member House, tenuously controlled by opposition Democrats. He led a video camera up to the third floor of the Capitol on Monday to show that lawmakers weren’t meeting at that moment to address the state’s pressing business, posting the Academy Award-worthy results on his Facebook page.
“We have less than 19 days left now for this House to be in session — together with the Senate — and there’s nothing being done,’’ Bevin bloviated in a manner that already has become all-too-familiar to commonwealth residents. “There’s not a soul in here except for me. What are people doing? You are paying these people to work.”
And working they were.
While Bevin was staging this masterpiece, a number of lawmakers were huddled in the Capitol Annex (that’s the rather mundane-looking building behind the Capitol, Matty, you can see it from your office window) trying to make lemonade out of the lemon of a budget Bevin dispatched in January.
And, by the way, the chamber was empty at the time the epic was filmed because the House had not yet met. Lawmakers as a rule don’t gather until 4 p.m. on Mondays, providing those from the outer reaches like Fulton or Middlesboro time to arrive and address the state’s business. Now either Bevin didn’t understand the legislative schedule, which renders him a dull boy since it’s been handled that way for generations, or he was intentionally trying to mislead the citizens of the commonwealth he is sworn to represent, a service he performs regularly with great panache.
Traditionally, consideration of a budget is put off until the session’s closing days since it usually is the most complicated, contentious and important piece of legislation the General Assembly takes up. There’s no great rush – the spending plan that eventually passes won’t take effect until July 1. And the joke of a proposal laid out by the administration this go round – including $650 million in spending cuts that will decimate state universities and require cabinet secretaries to determine how to slice their agencies by 9 percent in each year of the spending cycle – requires a lot of review.
Now, before we slog further, please don’t view this missive as a belated valentine to the Kentucky General Assembly. When Mark Twain referred to Washington as that “grand, old, benevolent national asylum for the helpless’’ he might just as easily been talking about Frankfort while the legislature is in session.
In order to increase the tax base, the commonwealth needs better paying jobs. In order to attract better paying jobs, the commonwealth has to invest in education. In order to invest in education, the commonwealth has to reform the tax code to raise revenue to invest in schools, thus attracting more jobs and avoiding future tax increases
It’s the same story every two years. Harold Ramis could have filmed Groundhog Day in Frankfort just as easily as he filmed it in Punxsutawney, PA. Lawmakers arrive crowing about jobs, jobs jobs. The best way to get more work for the state’s 4.4 million residents, they’ll insist, is to improve the low-to-middling education system from top to bottom, thus making the commonwealth a desirable place for business.
By the end of the session lawmakers will fail to provide the educational system with anything near the dough it needs to produce a knowledgeable and trained workforce and the state universities, which should really be the engines for economic development, will be crippled further. And then, of course, they’ll bemoan the fact that businesses are yet again ignoring the state and they’ll blame it on any number of boogiemen, organized labor and environmentalists, mostly, instead of looking in the mirror and realizing they yet again failed to make the necessary investments.
Regardless, they’ll continue to bolster a coal industry that rests at death’s door by, if it ultimately passes, approving a bill ending state mine safety inspections. Anticipating a revival of King Coal at this stage is akin to Vladimir and Estragon waiting for Godot. Yet you can bet they’ll do everything they can for this zombie of an industry while other sectors go wanting.
And of course they’ll also ignore serious lawmakers like Rep. Jim Wayne, D-Louisville, and Rep. Tom Burch, D-Louisville, who offer House Bill 342 that reforms Kentucky’s relic of a tax code and raises revenues by about $570 million a year, bewailing the effort as a massive tax increase.
Look at it this way: In order to increase the tax base, the commonwealth needs better paying jobs. In order to attract better paying jobs, the commonwealth has to invest in education. In order to invest in education, the commonwealth has to reform the tax code to raise revenue to invest in schools, thus attracting more jobs and avoiding future tax increases.
Will they do it? Don’t be silly. They’ll go back to their districts, brag that they didn’t raise taxes and ignore a crumbling educational system and the dearth of good-paying jobs. Instead they’ll talk about rendering it more difficult for poor, young women to get abortions, making same-sex couples feel increasingly like second-class citizens and how they made it so much easier to destroy the state’s delicate environment.
So Bevin and lawmakers now find themselves engaged in the commonwealth’s biennial pas de deux, positioning themselves to blame each other for the failings of a bad budget even though they essentially are skipping along the same potholed path.
Suffice to say, then, Gov. Matt Bevin and the Kentucky General Assembly deserve each other. And the good citizens of the commonwealth deserve it as well. After all, they put them in there.
Washington correspondent Bill Straub served 11 years as the Frankfort Bureau chief for The Kentucky Post. He also is the former White House/political correspondent for Scripps Howard News Service. He currently resides in Silver Spring, Maryland, and writes frequently about the federal government and politics. Email him at williamgstraub@gmail.com.
I have attended two legislative forums in NKY this year, and Rep. Arnold Simpson is the only legislator who had the guts to say that the state needs additional revenues to meet its commitments. Education continues to be shortchanged, and programs and personnel in the Energy/Environment Cabinet took a big hit in the previous administration and now in the Bevin era. The bottom line is we need more money and HB342 addresses that problem.