There oughta be a law

STATE LEGISLATORS MAY HAVE trouble tackling California’s biggest problems, but they have plenty of ideas for solving the smallest ones. Obscene images on vanity license plates? Sex offenders casting their votes too close to grade schools? Plastic bottles making exaggerated claims of biodegradability? Insufficiently trained dentists and podiatrists performing acupuncture?

Check, check, check and check.

Facing a deadline Friday for introducing bills, lawmakers filed a barrage of proposals -- more than 450 in the Assembly and 230 in the Senate through Thursday. Although many addressed such weighty matters as environmental protection and health insurance, many were a bit less, well, consequential. Certainly less consequential than the state’s chronic budget deficit, its aging infrastructure and its broken energy regulatory system.

Most bills never make it out of committee, let alone are signed into law. And lawmakers have been at such loggerheads with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger that no measure of any consequence seems likely to be enacted, particularly in an election year.

Nevertheless, lawmakers keep trying to make laws. And in the grand Sacramento tradition, they are seeking to use the power of state government to advance pet causes -- sometimes literally.

Assembly Bill 2350, for example, by Visalia Republican Bill Maze, would have the state design and sell special-interest tags that promote “character education”; apparently, the state Education Code calls on teachers to impress upon their charges’ minds the principles of morality, patriotism and “kindness toward domestic pets,” among other values. So long as alligators and crocodiles remain undomesticated, the gentleman from Visalia may be able to find an ally from Murietta in the Senate: Republican Dennis Hollingsworth, author of Senate Bill 1485, which would address the apparent critical shortage in California of dead alligator and crocodile parts. The bill would lift the ban on importing said parts, provided that the alligator or crocodile in question was not on the state’s list of endangered species.

Democrats were at least as busy during last week’s rush. Their proposals included measures to make it easier to beat a ticket for parking on a street scheduled for cleaning; to bar dogs from being tethered to stationary objects beyond a “reasonable period,” whatever that means; and to double the maximum number of people permitted at certain beer tastings. Apparently people who park their cars illegally and tie up their dogs while they attend beer tastings have more political clout than we realized.