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I wish legislators at every level could be given a day off work every month to attend a full docket of courtroom proceedings. They would see the human face of somebody who lost their dog the night before and then couldn’t find a non-public place to sleep. They would see how difficult life can be sometimes for people who have no assumed privileges.

They would hear attorneys use loopholes in laws they’ve written to subvert their intent. They would see jurors who are genuinely confused about whether a law they worked on pertains to a very specific circumstance. Their confusion often comes down to a poorly worded phrase or clumsy sentence construction which may have seemed “good enough” when they voted for it.

And, if they attend a Supreme Court session, they’d observe justices wrestling with the wording of a law, trying their best to interpret it, but limited to the text itself. I once attended a court case that turned on whether a Virginia driver had been lawfully stopped for a missing tail light. The state’s vehicle code had not been updated since the 1940s. The code required only that a vehicle have an operating “stop lamp” (singular).

My hope would be that the lawmakers return to their regular job with newfound resolve to do their work conscientiously and thoroughly. Laws that are less than clear can sometimes tie others into Gordian knots, and it would be good for those who write laws to see the consequences for themselves.

Meanwhile, judges would likewise do well to regularly observe the difficulties their rulings can create for legislators. 

In 2018, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Boise, Idaho had violated the constitutional rights of those without homes. Rousting them from public places amounted to cruel and unusual punishment. That decision sent city councilors and state legislators scurrying for solutions.

Circuit judges Marsha S. Berzon, Paul J. Watford, and John B. Owens may well have been correct when they described this cruelty, but where would the necessary housing units be found and who would pay for them? The judges voiced no concern about such practicalities, but they also didn’t provide access to any new resources to solve the problem.

Sometimes the court’s fallibility cuts in the opposite direction. A three-judge panel last week ruled that Eugene’s so-called Climate Kids cannot ask the courts to intervene, forcing the federal government to urgently address the hazards — present and future — that its policies have wreaked on the planet’s climate systems.

The judges ruled that the remedies must come from the legislators themselves, even though lawmakers have proven themselves incapable of sustaining their resolve at a large enough scale to make a significant difference.

Who will have the last word on the matter of the imminent climate disaster? It won’t be the lawmakers or the judges. It may be the people, rising in rebellion. More likely, it will be the planet itself.

Lawmakers and judges fail to see both the importance and the impotence of their work. If they only got out more, they could see it for themselves.

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Don Kahle (fridays@dksez.com) writes a column each Friday for The Register-Guard and blogs at www.dksez.com.

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