Hawaii’s legislature shapes up

Unless Hawaii’s state legislature does something really wild and crazy, they’re just 90 days shy of not passing any lame laws for three years.

I was digging around HawaiiReporter this morning looking for worthy reading to add to my stack of worthless topics to write about, and came upon the section entitled Lame Law of the Week. Perfect. Governments, whether local, or state, or federal, or foreign, are always passing lame laws that, only and purely in retrospect, make the lawpassers look stupid.

Unfortunately, the section Lame Law of the Week seems to support Hawaii’s legislators as some kind of class act, capable of doing little wrong. At least, little wrong that gets a measure of scrutiny from the fourth estate. Who’s monitoring the monitors?

In theory, Lame Law of the Week is a good idea, and a great way for media folks to keep an eye on what the elected legislators are doing to protect us from ourselves. I’m not certain that legislators pass a sufficient number of laws to have a lame one every week, but if all their new laws are lame, and they can only muster up one a week, then it all works out.

The problem with anything that’s counted weekly, is coming up with something every week to be counted. Based on the Lame Law of the Week section, Hawaii’s legislators are to be commended, since the last entry for a lame law was in early February, 2005, almost three years ago.

Has the state legislature done no wrong since then? If so, then why are they meeting in special session now to try to fix what they broke back then? Where are the lame laws that we so desperately need to know? If anything, we need a lame law or two just to fill the weekly Lame Law quota.