Listen very carefully and you can still hear Gov. Mike Dunleavy laughing. He got elected by promising short-sighted voters a $3,000 Permanent Fund dividend. Now he’s gotten his devastating vetoes upheld by separating the Legislature into two separate groups 565 miles apart, two-thirds in Juneau and one-third in Wasilla.
If our Keystone Cop legislators had all been together in one place, there was a high likelihood that the governor’s vetoes would have been overridden before the deadline, which has now passed. When Dunleavy decided to hold the special session in Wasilla, it was easy to predict that not all our legislators would go along with it, and would resist by meeting in Juneau, where it should be. The governor not only played the majority of the voters, with a $3,000 carrot, but he played the legislative branch by splitting them up, and it worked.
For our legislators to argue that each group was in the right to meet where they did is like a driver who gets into a preventable accident by claiming he had the right-of-way. If overriding the vetoes was important, a few plane tickets could have solved the problem. The voters will not forget.
— Bill McCreary
Palmer
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