Where the heck is our vaunted watchdog mainstream media while the General Assembly moves to shut out all manner of dissent from our legislative process?
When House Bill 184 passed out of the A&R Committee without a single "no" vote yesterday afternoon, I expected to see some fiery responses from the very newspeople who will be shut out of what will no longer have to be an open form of government. If you don't live and breathe government and public policy then it's understandable if you don't know what I'm talking about and I will do my best to explain this, but for those who know and yet stand by and say nothing, I feel utter disgust and despair. If you know or should know what they are about to do to us and yet choose to sit idly by, you make me sick. If you are still wondering, please read on.
HB 184 makes it legal for the General Assembly to hide any kind of law inside the budget only to spring it on us when Leadership emerges from their closed-door conference and there is little the rank-and-file can do but go along. There will be no reason to have open committee meetings or even floor votes; everything in budget years can go into one bill and we will have no input in what that bill does. We will see it when they are ready for us to see it.
What's worse, this merely makes legal what they have done by stealth in the last three budgets. First time, they slipped in a couple of illegal items on the budget bill. Two years ago, they put in sixteen. Last year, it was nearly thirty. Leadership knew it was illegal then; that's why Rep. Harry Moberly is pushing HB 184 now. He wants to make fascism legal in Kentucky.
It is past time we had some serious discussion about this. It won't wait till the next election. What are you going to do, vote out your legislator? Even if you can do that, it won't matter if he isn't in leadership and gets to go into the budget conference.
Seriously, outrages like this are what we have the 2nd ammendment for.
Update: Here is one story.
