It's a fairly common Statehouse phenomenon that bills will zoom out of the Senate or the House and then flame out in the other chamber. People in the other chamber don't always care as much as the people who first sponsor the bills. Often, they also don't want to be pushed around by the other chamber.

That explains part of what happened last week, when the Senate passed a major tax-cut package with a super-majority of 36 votes and then the bill received only eight votes in the House, despite the fact that the Senate bill would cost just a few million dollars more than the House's plan.

There's far more to this failure than the usual House-versus-Senate dynamic, of course. House Speaker Michael Madigan has declared neutrality on the bill, apparently because of a conflict of interest. Without the "Velvet Hammer" pushing hard for what is obviously a hugely controversial measure, the House just couldn't get it done.

Former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich was the only presidential candidate to receive straight "A"s in a report card on agricultural issues released November 30 by the Iowa Corn Growers Association.

While other GOP presidential candidates have called for phasing out federal energy tax credits, including those for ethanol, Gingrich has voiced his support for the corn-based fuel additive.

This issue's article on the Scott Emergency Communications Center (SECC) further illustrates government overreach run amok, beginning with our state legislators. State law (Iowa Code 28E) enabled the creation of the Scott Emergency Communications Center, an intergovernmental agency composed of five separate entities: the Scott County Emergency Management Agency, Scott County, the cities of Davenport and Bettendorf, and Medic EMS. Funding SECC is enabled through more state legislation (Iowa Code 29C) that provided for an unelected board as a brand-new taxing authority, with no limit on how much it may levy. And, as the details emerge, SECC gets to operate with no oversight whatsoever.

Let us never forget that the SECC was sold to Scott County taxpayers as a 7,800-square-foot building to consolidate emergency dispatching and enhance 911 service, saving taxpayers money along the way. The Bettendorf City Council barely passed the measure to join this scheme, approving it 4-3 in December 2007. The intergovernmental agreement that formalized this financial boondoggle specifically dictates that all decisions shall be guided by the 2006 CTA Communications consolidation study. So how did CTA's 7,800 square feet balloon into 27,000 square feet by February 2009?

The dismissal by SECC Director Brian Hitchcock and Scott County Administrator Dee Bruemmer of the very study that is to guide their decision-making, as the intergovernmental agreement dictates, stands as testimony that citizens need to be very concerned, and extremely vigilant. Such dismissal suggests that there was never any real intention to follow CTA's recommendations to begin with. This is further evidenced by Hitchcock's claim of good stewardship by reducing the original architectural design from a 36,000-square-foot facility to 27,000 square feet.

While all eyes last week turned to the Republicans' lawsuit against the new federal district map for U.S. congressmen in Illinois, a similar GOP lawsuit against the legislative district map for Springfield's state senators and representatives may be teetering on the brink of collapse.

Many of the same arguments are being used by the Republicans in both the congressional and state-legislative cases. Both suits have a partisan angle. The Republicans claim that the majority Democrats so intensely used political gerrymandering to draw their maps that the end result illegally deprived Republicans of their constitutional rights.

The court that is hearing the congressional-map case has yet to rule on the political angle, but the court that heard the state-legislative-remap case dismissed the Republicans' political charge last week. The political gerrymandering strategy was never considered all that solid because nobody has ever won a case using that argument. The strategy is given about the same chance of success - slim to none - in the congressional case.