It’s like the Kentucky Derby this past weekend.  The big group of horses rounds the last turn, accelerating, bumping, jostling, looking for an opening, straining for the finishing line.

And then, it’s over.  Suddenly.  Done.  In the record books. The exhausted competitors head back to their barns.

The last week of this year’s regular legislative session begins today.  All of the work, the hopes, the politicking, the lobbying, the deals and compromises, the conflicts and the consensus-building comes to a merciful end at 6 p.m. Friday.

The public has no concept of what their elected representatives go through on their behalf—or at the behest of those with power to force decisions—between early January and mid-May, especially in the weeks after Easter break when the clock begins to tick more loudly and the calendar pages fall more quickly.

The greatest responsibility the legislature has each year is passage of a state budget.  This year it is $51 billion, huge, the largest budget in state history.  The state is flush with money and sometimes there’s more fighting about state spending when there’s a lot than there is when there’s a little.  With the little, lawmakers have to cover the basic services. With a lot, there are more pet projects, more promises to be fulfilled, more conflicts about what constitutes responsible fiscal policy.

Time of plenty tend to breed unnecessary discussions of policies that ultimately will make times of little even worse.  It becomes harder to defend a system that allows consistent fiscal responsibility in good times as well as bad.

This is the week when bills become Christmas Trees, as they’re called in legislative circles—bills that begin as simple measures suddenly exploding in size as lawmakers who see their bills doomed for failure find bills with better prospects on which they can hang their issues.

Sometimes it works.  Sometimes the bills finish up violating a constitutional standard that a bill can contain only one subject. Sometimes an effort to piggyback a controversial issue onto a relatively non-controversial bill kills both.

Perhaps the biggest issue involving the above scenario involves sports wagering.  Hallway talk is that gambling interests will make one last push to finally get sports wagering by tacking the bill onto a Senate-passed tax bill during House debate and sending it back to the Senate for approval with no time for negotiations. The Senate must take sports wagering, which would face certain death on its own, if it wants to finally approve a more general bill that it has already passed.

If you have trouble following that description, you are not alone.  Bills can become sacrificial lambs as well as becoming Christmas trees.  Believe it or not, the process as a certain fascination the more you watch it.  We will not try to influence your judgment about how moral or ethical that process is.

Sports wagering has at least one strong opponent in the Senate who is prepared to filibuster if the issue returns in some form from the House—and filibustering means there won’t be time for several other bills to be considered as the clock winds down.

So will the sports wagering advocates, desperate to get the issue approved after five years of previous failures, cause the death of other issues because they cannot take “no” for an answer? Again?

This is a nervous time for majority leadership in both chambers because they know every deck contains 52 wild cards at this time of year.   To their credit, they’ve run the place pretty well in 2023, particularly compared the debacle of 2022. But they know their leadership legacy might rest on what happens by 6 p.m. Friday.

Everybody is excited to be coming to Jefferson City each January.  But speed limits will become  just roadside advisories for a lot of people after the gavel falls Friday evening.