If a bill passes, why does the time of passage matter?

November 11, 2009 11:16 AM

Recently some controversial legislation was passed by my county board. The opposition is using the time it was passed - early in the morning, after hours of public testimony - as a point of criticism. I am at a loss to understand why this is a talking point. Can you help me understand it?

The specific legislation is the authorization of a Regional Transit Authority (RTA) in Dane County, Wisconsin. I was present for all testimony, and many speakers mentioned that the current legislation, if passed, would be enacted in the small hours of the morning. This has also been mentioned in some media coverage of the event and in inane blog and news article comments.

Since the meeting of the county board began at the sane hour of 7:00 PM, and citizen testimony went on for four hours despite the board voting to reduce the time given to each speaker, how can the opposition criticize the legislation on this grounds? It's not as if the legislation was passed in secret - over 350 people attended and either spoke or registered their position on the issue.

If you can arm me with a concise, clear, and non-hostile argument on why this is a non-issue, that's an added bonus.

posted by yomimono to law & government (11 comments total)

There can be a fair amount of chicanery involved in public hearings. You can pretty effectively depress the level of participation by poorly advertising the meeting, holding it during working hours, things like that. I suspect that's what they're getting at.

But realistically, it sounds like they're just anti-whatever-the-issue and are trying to build opposition. The hours seem reasonable and it sounds like it was well attended. (I've held public information meetings where one or no people showed up.)

A good response might be a summary of the citizen testimony. Was it largely for your position, or did the governing body vote contrary to what the majority of people expressed?
posted by electroboy at 11:33 AM on November 11

Potential issues could include the inability of certain groups of constituents (parents without childcare, people who work night shifts, people who work early in the morning, etc.) to be represented at the meeting. It might not be a point of criticism, either, but rather underscoring the fact that the legislation is highly contentious and required debate late into the night to pass. This could be an argument that the issue does not, in fact, represent the views of the residents of the county but of a slim majority. A third issue might just be that this is unusual; the mentioning in multiple media outlets (especially blogs) might just be due to reporters/bloggers looking to each other's coverage and repeating salient points.
posted by proj at 11:35 AM on November 11

Also "wee hours of the morning" is akin to "smoke-filled back rooms" and "special-interests" (Who doesn't have special interests? Mine are public parks and pedestrian friendly neighborhoods). It's intended to evoke deceit and political machinations.
posted by electroboy at 11:41 AM on November 11

citizen testimony went on for four hours despite the board voting to reduce the time given to each speaker

The opposition would argue that the board reduced the time for each speaker because they were intent on passing the ordinance whether the citizens wanted it or not, with the implication that the board was getting something out of the deal.

also: "wee hours of the morning" is akin to "smoke-filled back rooms" and "special-interests" (Who doesn't have special interests? Mine are public parks and pedestrian friendly neighborhoods). It's intended to evoke deceit and political machinations.
posted by ArgentCorvid at 11:46 AM on November 11

The opposition is using the time it was passed - early in the morning, after hours of public testimony - as a point of criticism. I am at a loss to understand why this is a talking point.

The fact that there was hours of testimony, presumably for and against, means this is a controversial issue where no consensus has been reached. I think it's a not-uncommon belief that changes to the status quo should only happen when there's a reasonably strong consensus from most stakeholders about the best way to change things. I think this is particularly true the more local of a political process you're talking about.

I think the only way you can combat this belief is by either showing that the opposition was acting in bad faith (that is, you could talk until you were blue in the face but no one was going to change minds, and there is no prospect for changing positions, and no compromise is possible because they wouldn't be happy with anything except the status quo), or by making the case that the issue being addressed was so urgent that leaving the status quo in place was untenable, even if a solution everyone liked wasn't available.
posted by iminurmefi at 11:51 AM on November 11

When people are tired their judgment suffers. Whether that's what happened here or not, I don't know, but it's not an unreasonable argument.

I can't find a cite for it right now, but I've heard of arbitrators who have kept parties involved in talks well into the night/wee hours of the morning in order to get them to agree to things that they would not have agreed to if they had been feeling refreshed and wide awake.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 12:11 PM on November 11

as devilsadvocate says, the sleepiness might have been a factor. when something is passed in the middle of the night it, at least on the surface, smacks of "give the baby his bottle so we can all go home"
posted by nadawi at 12:15 PM on November 11

It makes it sound as though the committee was simply held there until they returned the "right" decision so they could go home — a not-uncommon tactic, in my experience with local politics.

(Of course it's amateurish; if you really want to play hardball with a "public" hearing, everyone knows the best way to do it is get the fire marshall on your side, hold it in a small venue, pack it with your supporters early, and then have the marshall block the opposition from entering on 'safety' grounds. Violá — instant unanimity. The politicians can even say with a straight face later on that they never heard any complaints!)
posted by Kadin2048 at 1:09 PM on November 11 [2 favorites]

It depends on how many people were still at the meeting when the motion was voted upon. If it was so late that very few people were there, the argument is that this was not passed with transparency. Would the vote have been different if it was voted upon with all 300 people there? Why couldn't the panel simply wait to vote until either the next meeting or the next day at a time that is considered regular to these types of meetings?
posted by JohnnyGunn at 2:52 PM on November 11

For about twenty years of my professional life I appeared before City Councils, Boards of Supervisors, Planning Commissions and State Legislatures. In that time I was able to judge what my opposition and support would be and observe the dynamic regarding not only the issues I represented, but also other issues before these bodies. In my opinion, the reference to "...the small hours of the morning..." suggests that the speakers inherently distrust the members of the deciding body. "You're going to wait until all of us law-abiding citizens (can't stay up any longer)(have to go home to relieve the baby sitter)(leave in frustration), etc., to push through the thing we are opposing. We know you are dragging this out so we'll be worn down."

I have attended many a mid-day meeting where the argument was that, if it had been held at night more people could have attended. "I had to take time off from work to be here and there would have been thousands more here if you had held this meeting at night." I have attended night meetings where the complaint was that people are too tired after a long day at work to attend.

Anyone who thinks they are going to be on the short side of the vote and/or are mistrusting of those who be voting will see the ulterior motives of those in charge.

I have also seen Boardmembers try to appease these people by carrying the meeting over to another date. The response is something like this, "You're just doing this to get rid of us. You are betting that we can't keep coming back..."

Welcome to Democracy. In spite of it all, it actually works pretty well.
posted by Old Geezer at 5:10 PM on November 11

I am in Rock County, btw.

I am at a loss to understand why this is a talking point.

Because the opposition needs a hook. There is already an undercurrent of tea-party distrust of Big Government running strong this year. They know it's popular -- they wear their being out of step with comparatively liberal Dane County (1238 square miles, surrounded by reality?) as a badge of honor. To them, they are the trampled minority, and often, the overtaxed minority at the mercy of the underclass who will happily vote in anything as long as it is paid for by everyone else.

Anyway. I spend too much of my time arguing with "CAVE men" on my local paper's website, where our city council or county board's grappling with difficult budgetary issues is regularly cartoonified as spending on "WANTS vs. NEEDS" even though there's no real way to define these things and different factions define them quite differently.

Anyway, it's good to keep in mind that phrase from the Declaration of Independence: He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their Public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures. It may not actually be any kind of violation to hold a vote at 2 a.m. or so, but it comes across to those who were not there that the process is rigged to happen one way whether they speak up or not, and the time of a vote being unusual just looks to them like a set-up job.

Still, it doesn't matter. They are opposed, and they will argue whatever is convenient to support that position. It's not of great value either way -- the people who are convinced by such an argument were not going to support the other side regardless. It's just a motivator. Don't spend too much time on points like this.
posted by dhartung at 6:01 PM on November 11