Kentucky's legislators have shown unusual willingness this year to waste their time and taxpayers' money.
Keep teenagers in school? Protect the elderly in nursing homes? Create a more fair and adequate tax system? Can't get it done. But lawmakers have plenty of time to push legislation that belabors the obvious.
Republicans want schools to set aside time for children to say the pledge of allegiance, which, by law, they already do. Democrats want a constitutional amendment to protect the right to hunt and fish, which has never been threatened.
Most telling of all, two lawmakers want to proclaim the right of Kentucky's coal industry to do as it pleases. Every Kentuckian knows the coal industry has always done that, with plenty of help from our politicians.
Rep. Jim Gooch, a Providence Democrat and climate-change denier, proposed legislation that would exempt coal mining from the Clean Water Act and other federal environmental regulations if the coal never leaves Kentucky.
Even more ridiculous is a Senate joint resolution calling for Kentucky to be a "sanctuary state" for the coal industry, freeing it from regulation by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. That proposal was made by Sen. Brandon Smith, a Hazard Republican who once managed a company the EPA went after for spilling 7,000 gallons of oil into a Laurel County creek.
Gooch and Smith say the coal industry should only be regulated by the state. But what they really want is no effective regulation at all. Too often, they amount to the same thing.
Consider this example from last week's headlines: State regulators must submit a plan to the U.S. Office of Surface Mining by April 1 to raise the cash bonds coal companies must post to ensure that land is reclaimed after mining. In dozens of cases since 2007, companies shut down and left a mess that their bonds didn't begin to cover. This time, as previously, state regulators are raising bonds only because federal regulators are forcing them to.
To read the complete column, visit www.kentucky.com.
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