A good many of you have asked why simple, straightforward, no nonsense, good government legislation fails to pass even though it appears to have universal and overwhelming support and appeal among voters and legislators.

Remember the old sayings and adages from the lips of your grandparents and older folks that you felt irrelevant and quaint? Sayings like “If you’ve got your health, you’ve got everything” and “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.” The older you get, it occurs to you how accurate and wise these old sayings are in actual life.

One of these sage adages, “It takes an act of congress,” pertains to the difficulty of getting something accomplished. In politics there is no clearer truism. It is extremely difficult to pass a piece of legislation through Congress, and it is just as equally difficult to channel a bill through the labyrinth of legislative approval in Alabama. Ask any successful lobbyist or legislator which side they would rather be on in the legislative wars and they will tell you they much prefer to be against a piece of legislation than trying to pass it.

The Senate rules are such that if a handful of the 35 senators are adamantly opposed to the legislation, it is easy work to kill the bill. If the right senator is against the bill and wants it killed, it is dead. It doesn’t matter if the proposed legislation is as all-American as apple pie and motherhood, the legislation would still be difficult to pass.

If for nothing else, the bill has to go before both the House and Senate committees, win approval and avoid having an amendment added to it. If an amendment is added, the bill basically has to start all over again. The bill is then placed on the special order calendar set by the Rules Committee and there are hundreds of bills waiting to get on the calendar. Only a few bills make it on the calendar each day, and there are only 30 legislative days in the session. When the bill makes it out of committee, it then has to pass both houses and the governor. If he vetoes the bill, the process begins all over again.

Let me give you a personal example. When I was a freshman legislator, I was asked to sponsor such an “American apple pie” bill. There was a quirk in Alabama’s criminal laws that allowed the family of a defendant to be in the courtroom during a criminal trial and sit behind him/her and observe and cry on behalf of their relative. However, the family of the crime victim could not be in the courtroom. The Victims of Crime and Leniency (“Vocal ”) sought to correct this injustice and asked me to sponsor their bill and work toward its passage, which I did.

The press gave me and the bill glowing editorials for its fairness. We got the bill out of the House, where it passed overwhelmingly. However, when it got to the Senate, it was assigned, rightfully so, to the Senate Judiciary Committee, the chairman of which was Sen. Earl Hilliard from Jefferson County. He was opposed to the bill, and as chairman he deep-sixed it and would not let it out of committee. No amount of haranguing from Vocal or bad press could budge Earl.

However, one day I was on the floor of the House and the Vocal leader, Miriam Shehane, called me out to the lobby. She said Earl was sick and would not be in Montgomery that day but the Senate Judiciary Committee was meeting and the vice chairman was going to bring the bill up out of order. We quickly went to the sixth floor and whisked our bill out of the Judiciary Committee. It won final approval in the Senate a few weeks later and became law.

See you next week.

Steve Flowers is a political columnist on state issues. His column appears weekly in 75 Alabama newspapers. Steve served 16 years in the State Legislature. He may be contacted at www.steveflowers.us.