Special session is expression of frustration

This past month, federal courts have entered stays on several of the Biden COVID vaccine mandates applicable to Wyoming.  This means that those mandates cannot be implemented until the lawsuits challenging the mandates are decided or the judge otherwise decides to lift the stay prior to the end of the case.  These stays come after the Wyoming legislature spent seven days and approximately $215 thousand in a special session with the stated intent of pushing back on those same mandates.  However, despite the approximately twenty bills filed in the special session – most of which were aimed at COVID responses and requirements – the legislature only passed a single bill, and a rather innocuous one at that.  House Bill 1002 provides for an appropriation of $4 million for the state attorney general to fight federal COVID mandates in Court.  None of the bills attempting to prohibit employer mandates, ban compliance with federal mandates, or keep schools or school districts from enacting mask mandates ultimately received legislative approval.
The fact that only one bill passed is both surprising and telling.  House Bill 1002 was probably the best bill of the group in that it did the least: it provided an appropriation to fight the mandates in court and it included a largely toothless prohibition on enforcing the federal mandates during times when there is already no obligation to enforce the federal mandates.  Other bills tried to do more but failed in large part because they were drafted during a time when the rules enacting the mandates had not even been issued yet.  Rather than be carefully tailored toward a specific problem, they were broad in scope.  It quickly became clear that they threatened to do far more harm than good.
Special sessions are rightfully very rare, and this session illustrates why.  If there is one thing to be learned from this experience, it is that these sessions should be called only in extreme circumstances.  The original plan for this session was to hold it in only three days, limiting public comment and the amount of time available to consider bills.  Had this happened, it is almost certain that the end result would have been worse.  It was only through public comment and the engagement of parties that would have been impacted by these bills that some of the negative potential impacts were brought to light.  The legislative process is purposefully slow, and this session illustrates why that is a good thing.  When a deliberative body tries to act quickly on legislation without full consideration of its impacts, we all run the risk of laws that do not do what they were intended.  As a general rule, the faster the policy was made, the more likely it is to be bad policy.  
At its core, the special session was an expression of frustration.  Very few who had spent time around government had an expectation of meaningful legislation resulting from the session.  There is very little a state legislature can do to try to limit federal orders.  It simply is the wrong venue for that fight.  Instead, those fights almost invariably happen either in Congress in Washington or in federal court.  Nevertheless, the Wyoming legislature apparently felt it had to do “something.”  Unfortunately, this attitude results in more performance than policy.  With little expectation or opportunity for meaningful action, instead the legislature spent several days and hundreds of thousands of dollars in what amounted to a public expression of unhappiness.  A better use of resources would have been to simply pass a resolution condemning the mandates and then sit back and allow the attorney general to do what was already in the works: challenging the mandates in federal court.  An even better use of resources would probably have been to do nothing at all and instead wait until the regularly-scheduled session to undertake more thoughtful consideration of how to respond to the federal action, if at all.
Following the legislative session, things are largely the same as if the session had never happened.  The mandates are being considered in federal court, which is the best venue for that determination.  One of the very purposes of the federal judiciary is to consider big questions of government.  What is the scope of powers available to the executive branch?  Has the executive branch overreached its proper role?  Whether you support, oppose, or are indifferent to the actions taken by the Biden administration the proper, and most efficient, place for those questions to be answered is in a federal lawsuit.  That is what was expected to happen before the special session and what is happening now after it.  The only thing accomplished by that session was to spend a week’s time and money expressing frustration that we all already were aware of.  Hopefully the legislature avoids similar pitfalls in the future.