April 29th, General Assembly Adjourned Sine Die

Sine die: [Latin, without day]: without any future date
being designated for resumption: indefinitely.
– Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary

During the 2009 – 2010 term, the Georgia General Assembly introduced just over 6,000 pieces of legislation – almost equally divided at just over 3,000 per year. That’s quite a load for a 40-day part-time legislature, the majority of whose members are employed in the private sector.

So, consider this. Do those legislators read the bills and understand their affect before voting yes or no? A better question would be this. Is it possible for them to read and comprehend the effect of each piece of legislation before casting their vote? A little arithmetic provides the answer to both questions and reveals how helpful it is for citizen lobbyists to read bills for them.

Start with the allotted length of a session – 40 days – and presume eight hours to work per day. That presumes a total of 320 work hours per session. Some days they work less, some more. Multiply the 320 hours by 60 minutes and conclude that legislators have only 19,200 minutes to do “the people’s work” during those 40-day sessions. By dividing 19,200 by the rounded-off figure of 3,000 bills and resolutions, you learn that legislators would have 6.4 minutes to read and study each piece of legislation, if they did nothing else all day, every day for 40 days.

• To read the rest of this newsletter in PDF format, please click here.