Surplus scenarios
That the minority Otherhood in the Senate will coalesce and vote against all surplus spending appropriations on capital projects until those projects are prioritized, thus preventing the necessary three-fourths vote for approval — why, it's spectacularly good policy and ought to be, and could be, yet another step toward what could be an extraordinarily good session. The problem will be if the Senate Brotherhood and House members rear up in defense of pet projects or petty turf, in which case one scenario would be that the legislature would adjourn without appropriating any general improvement money at all. That would be all right, actually, except for school facilities, and that would keep the Lake View case alive. The best scenario is that, as Otherhood leader Jim Argue suggests, the bill compiling projects would be approved before individual appropriations are. That's simply sound fiscal behavior — to sort your projects and prioritize them before you start passing a bunch of individual stuff. It is not "sad," as Sen. Gilbert Baker says, and it is not personal, as Sen. Shawn Womack charges. Too much of this business in the Senate is adolescence about how someone was treated or perceived himself to be treated years ago. Bob Johnson needs to be generous here. He's the Brotherhood glue and he has won the battle for control of the Senate. He'll be the next president pro tem. He has reformed his thinking, or at least his rhetoric, about general improvement projects. He needs to work with Argue and the others. What could possibly be the harm in prioritizing spending? It'll be up to Benny Petrus to maintain sanity in the House, where they're still living in the past, filing individual little bills for their individual little local projects.