Midnight ride, midnight oil

When Mainers turned in Thursday night, they had every reason to believe that the controverial teacher fingerprinting law would be amended to apply to new hires only and that their state would be the first in the nation to do something about soaring drug prices besides throw more money at the pharmaceutical industry. Came the dawn Friday and the House had changed its mind back to fingerprinting all teachers, support for the drug bill was withering.

Blame intense lobbying. Blame the give-and-take, the compromise, that is essential to legislating. Blame, maybe, Paul Revere.

For weeks, the subtext to all reports out of Augusta has been that the budget and other legislation must be completed by this weekend to get the session — the so-called short session — wrapped up by Patriots Day and the accompanying school vacation. Deadlines can be a good thing, they are a powerful force for getting endless talk turned into decisive action, but , especially on issues as important as these, a deadline is no excuse for last-minute reversals that carry the unmistakable odor of expediency.

This is not to suggest that the legislative process would be better if Mr. Revere had waited until, say, mid May or even early June to take his famous ride. The problem is not that this session is ending too soon. The problem is that it started too slowly.

The short session, constitutionally and theoretically, is devoted to developing a supplemental budget, unfinished business from the previous long session and emergencies. Many, make that most, of 300-plus bills stuffed into the hopper in January hardly fit that definition. It is the responsibility of the legislative leadership of both parties to keep the rank-and-file focused upon the priorities, even if that means asking a well-meaning back-bencher to withhold a well-meaning but nonessential bill for the long session.

It is also the responsibility of leadership to manage time wisely. This session, far too much of January, February and most of March was spent on bills that did not meet the short session criteria and far too little on those that did. As a result, Mainers may well wake up this morning to find that only left-handed teachers of Lithuanian descent will be fingerprinted and that the solution to the pharmaceutical problem is state-run bus excursions to Canada.

In light of this self-inflicted hurly-burly, it’s rather amazing that lawmakers came up with a budget, a few items notwithstanding, as reasonable as they did. The $350 million deal worked out essentially between Gov. King and majority Democrats does a fairly good job of balancing needs. Certainly, school districts will not be delighted that a $300-million surplus could only produce an $18.5-million increase in state aid. Although GPA has been increased several years running now and is at least nudging 50 percent of education costs, the Legislature has yet to firmly state whether or not it intends to keep the 55-percent pledge make 15 years ago.

Minority Republicans, though sidelined for the final budget negotiations with the governor, stuck with a few central tax-cut issues throughout the session and had did have a significant impact. They advocated for indexing to prevent income-tax bracket creep and got it. Although there are far more beneficial forms of tax relief out there, the GOP’s strong stand on the snack-tax repeal made it a given from the start.

Gov. King did pretty well, too. His worthy proposal to use $50 million of surplus to create an endowment to provide all seventh-graders with laptop computers was shredded so thoroughly that all he came away with was $30 million from surplus, the ability to boost it with unexpended account balances and a technology study commission that, unless it ignores all previous studies on the subject, will have to conclude that laptops and the Internet are the future, the immediate future, of education. Whether the distribution of these learning tools is means-tested, whether they go to seventh, ninth or fith-graders are merely details.

Still, given the only modest increase in GPA and in school renovation funding, Mainers must be curious to know what happened to all those legislators who swore that not one dime would go into anything even resembling laptops until state aid was made whole and every last leaky school roof fixed. Mainers must also be curious as to how the needed construction of a new facility to replace the aging and obsolete Augusta Mental Health Institute went from a pay-as-you expenditure from surplus to a government facilities bond, the kind of bond that doesn’t need voter approval. Curious, but too sleepy to stay up late enough to find out.