Paul Blanchard, founding director of the Center for Kentucky History and Politics at Eastern Kentucky University, has been an observer of state politics for more than 30 years. He sat down with Staff Writer Paul Glasser to discuss his assessment of the 2008 legislative session.
What was at stake for the voters and taxpayers of Kentucky in the 2008 General Assembly?
Well, it's like most sessions of the General Assembly; a lot is at stake and, of course, this session was different because of the financial difficulties the state found itself in. I've been watching governors come and go for more than 30 years and almost without exception every new governor came in and said, "Oh, my goodness. The cupboard is bare.' Although this time most people would acknowledge that the cupboard was more bare than usual. We have a lot of initiatives going on in Kentucky that are always at stake. Education reform beginning in 1990, higher education reform beginning in 1997 " always subject to either attack or lack of support over time " and I think those two are certainly the things closest to my heart which certainly took a hit in the 2008 session. But, of course, just any number of social service programs was at stake for a lot of Kentuckians.
How would you assess the recent legislative session? Were legislators productive or unproductive?
Legislators are always productive depending on your definition of the word productive. They do a lot of things. They work real hard. They pass a lot of bills. But what every legislative session comes down to, of course, is the number one issue, which is the budget, and in my view it's become more and more difficult in every session to reach agreement on the budget between the House and Senate. This has been a real problem since the Republicans took control of the Senate in 2000. I worked with the legislature directly in 2004-2005-2006-2007 sessions and in the 2004 session they didn't reach a budget agreement and then they had difficulty the other three years as well. There are a lot of criticisms of the budget that were produced under very difficult fiscal conditions as I mentioned. I think the fact that the legislators reached an agreement " the House and Senate budget committees reached an agreement " is one indication of productivity but a lot of the things that many people hoped would happen did not happen so in that sense they fell short of a real effective session.
Once again the budget came down to the last minute. A lot of legislators are talking about opening up the process to public scrutiny. Is that a good idea? What can be done to make sure there is time to review the conference committee report?
I think that's the key to everything that I've been thinking about relative to what's happened. In terms of opening up the process, they tried to do that this time. I watched attempts of that in the past and you're dealing with elected officials, I won't use the word "politician' disparagingly because I think that's an honorable profession but there is by necessity a lot of posturing. In the public eye that kind of thing happens more than actual negotiations on disagreement and so they discovered this time after I think a good attempt at open decision making that it just wasn't going to happen and then they closed the process and then went into that marathon 24-hour session, or however many hours it was, so your question about "What can we do to make the process more timely, more effective,' I really think they need to set some hard and fast deadlines.
They have some about introducing bills and when all bills have to be introduced and when all bills have to be through one house, but I think they need to go beyond that and say, you know, by this date, probably sometime relatively early in March, the House needs to have its budget completed and by this date maybe second or third week in March, the Senate complained, I think with good reason, that they only had about a week to work on their budget after they got it from the House and I think they reasonably could use two weeks to do that, but then still say by March 20, we're going to have both Houses complete their budget. This has to be a legislative rule; we can't mandate it from the outside. I think you're going to see more and more talk about that in the months after the difficulties we've had this year. Again you'd have a week or so for the conference committee to meet and they could meet when they've all had enough sleep, when they've been able to read the entire budget and look at where the differences are. I just think it needs to have more rationality and of course anybody that's observed the Kentucky General Assembly would say rationality is not a word you'd use to describe it a lot of times but I think that's where we need to move.
Taking me back to legislation in general and not necessarily just the budget, who were the winners this session and who were the losers?
It's hard to say anybody won very much. Public elementary and secondary school teachers would consider themselves losers because they got only a 1 percent salary increase and they were promised in 2006 that their salary would be raised to the average of the surrounding states and now they're going to fall way short of that. Certainly higher education would be considered a loser because " and this is an indication of how bad the state's finances are " college presidents were happy that they only had to take a 3 percent cut after initially being told it would be 12 percent. There are just cuts across the board that are going to be very harmful to people.
One of the issues that I'm very interested in and a lot of people are, is the issue of pensions. We certainly were hoping, and it's hard to say who are winners or losers in that issue, but until we get the whole pension situation under control, that's going to be a problem for retirees and all current state employees.
What was some of the legislation that was passed and what issues fell by the wayside?
I was going to say in the position I was in I was following kind of the broad general issues more than specifics but of course the big issues that fell by the wayside were number one, casino gambling, which I think sort of characterizes some of the difficulties we had from day one of the Beshear administration. Gov. Beshear didn't seem to mobilize the kind of support necessary to even get his proposal serious consideration by the General Assembly, never even got out of committee. It's a difficult issue. I don't know exactly what he could have done but he didn't seem to give that issue the kind of attention that most people thought he would early on, and so that fell by the board and of course the other revenue producing legislation was the increase in tobacco tax which House is very much in favor of but they were not able to persuade the Senate to go along with them on that one and that could have produced some needed revenue for some of the programs that we've talked about before now.
Again, there's a difficulty in legislative decision making these days and that's kind of the culture of the "90s and this decade that people won't even consider a tax increase because they feel like it's going to hurt them politically. The tobacco tax has so many advantages in terms of discouraging young people from smoking in addition to the revenue it raises. I was disappointed personally that that didn't receive more support but here again it goes back to what I said at the very outset is that you've got leadership in two houses that look at things very differently particularly taxes and revenue and so on. The House more inclined to try to find more revenue, the Senate more inclined to make cuts. Based on the revenues that we have, both of those positions are very valid ones. The interesting thing to me " and I've been examining and writing about legislative decision making for a couple of decades " is the way the House and the Senate interact with each other. The House clearly is much less united in their leadership, in the way they deal with things than the Senate is and I'm one of many people who believe that President David Williams is the most powerful person in Frankfort. House Democrats would tell you that. I don't imagine Steve Beshear would tell you that. David Williams has just done a masterful job of keeping his votes together, keeping his troops together and the House has been all over the board in many respects.
Has the failure of his casino gaming initiative damaged the Governor's political position?
Oh, very much so. Gov. Beshear, for whom I have the greatest respect, has seen his approval ratings go down precipitously more so than any governor I can remember and I think it's largely attributable to what he did and did not do on casino gambling. I need to say that we make it very difficult in Kentucky for new governors coming in particularly in a fiscal time like we face now because they just don't have enough time to get their act together as it were. They are elected in November, they take office in early December and then they've got about three weeks to prepare a budget and there are little things like Christmas and New Year's that come in that time when it's hard to get any of your staff to focus on those kinds of things. It's phenomenal that governors do as good a job as they do in their first year and going back to old lectures I've given years and years ago, we changed the Constitution a few years ago so that now the Legislature has a one-year head start on a new governor. This Legislature that met January, February and March, they began their deliberations on the budget and all these other issues in January of 2007 and they're much more familiar with the issues than a governor who has gone through an intensive political campaign for the last 12 months so it stands to reason that any new governor is going to have difficulty, but as I said, Gov. Beshear has had more difficulty than most recent governors. Ernie Fletcher had a real tough first year very much like Gov. Beshear.
What happens to casino gambling now? Could it pop up again in the future?
What it comes down to is Gov. Beshear and a lot of other people in Kentucky that are very much supportive of this need to begin to again convince the people of Kentucky that this is something that needs to happen and I think there will be that effort made. I suspect a little time will pass before we'll see much in the way of initiatives in that regard. The argument that they have been making but maybe not enough and not effectively enough is that this is an issue that deserves a vote by the people of Kentucky and I thought that they were making some progress in using that tactic of saying, "This isn't a vote for casino gambling; it's a vote for letting the people of Kentucky make a decision on casino gambling.'
How would you grade Gov. Beshear on his first legislative session?
I've always had a hard time giving grades to my students so let's just leave it that he had a difficult session.