SERVANTS & SENATORS
"to thyne own self be true."
March 02, 2005 - 00:07 [z-05:00]
And this above all; to thyne own self be true. And then must fall, as night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man."
- Polonius' advice to his son - from Hamlet by Wm. Shakespeare
There is stardom going on in the South Carolina Senate.
Now, these are not actual receivers of men of gold or three-horned, bare-breasted, red-carpet erdemütters or even actors gazing into crystal balls. No, these are some of your everyday, run-of-the-mill state Senators, and they have become something they do not understand.
You are invited to watch every day on the internet at http://www.scstatehouse.net/ for the spectacle that has become the floor of our state's Senate. It's better than real TV, especially if you have broadband.
It's not that they are bad people, or stupid, or silly, or anything like that. Some are even doing the people's work. But for some reason, some of them think Senators are better than the House of Representatives. Not a day goes by without some Senator making a disparaging remark, however hidden or off-handed, about the accomplishments of the House. Is it Speaker envy?
One old wag suggested that certain Senators can't even go to the bathroom without making a 30 minute speech to inform the body that it will be a better job than the House did. That's a bit unfair, but the wag has his point. The Carolina Senate is a more deliberative body. They're supposed to be. In the old days, the House was supposed to propose, and the Senate was supposed to dispose. Since the Voting Rights Act, that screwed up the composure of our legislative bodies, all that is gone. Now we have Senators trying to write their own budgets and create their own spending fiefdoms.
That's also part of the problem.
The Senate is supposed to be the body of wise old men who take the law passed by the young whippersnappers and fine-tune them or reject them. But these days, some of them think they are both the House and the Senate. The latest example is the General Tort Reform Act. The House passed a perfectly sensible act which limits pain and suffering, actualizes (ie. refers to actuarial statistics as well as actual occurrence) real damages, and gets rid of something called "joint and several" which means that if you're only responsible for 1% of the problem (you made the glass in the car, but your glass worked fine, but it's still in the car which crashed all by itself), you only pay 1% of the settlement.
The "joint and several" thing was enough to give the Senator-Lawyers heart failure. You could see them licking their chops as they began to pick apart "joint and several."
"Once, again," they said, "we have been presented with a poor bill by the House, passed too quickly with loads of error."
But as you listened to the debate, before the bill was consigned to the Gehenna of "bad" Senate bills and the Senate began working on their own, you began to see the brilliance of the House bill, no matter how they tried to blast it with bombast.
Now, don't get me wrong. The House is not perfect.
But the honorable members will admit it.
Some Senators of the Senate see themselves as infallible. You say that to them and they'll accuse you of slander. But the fact is that they think they are so important, that they run our state.
Those Senators that know me, know that this is a friendly warning. They also know that the readers of this website are prescient people. We will see the problem early, while it can be fixed.
And if it takes it to make a difference, think of us SwampfoxNewsers as the humble servant who stands in the back of the chariot and gently reminds the famous Roman General - "remember, all glory is fleeting - thou art but mortal."
Yes, Senators are grand. They are powerful. They have potestas (power).
But they are also OUR servants. A little humility and inter-house cooperation might be in order. After ALL, GLORY IS FLEETING.
