Granby01033

For not the first time, Gov. Deval Patrick took the state legislature to task. The house had  refused to extend its formal session to complete Patrick's pet education bill. 

Patrick reminds me a little of a substitute teacher, trying to assert an authority he's really doesn't have. And the state legislature, like an unruly class, tends to ignore him until he gets strident. Then they start to laugh at him.

I haven't been paying attention to state politics long enough to know whether every one of our governors gets the same treatment. I don't know enough about other states to know if the same dynamic plays out there. (New York may be an extreme case).

The State House News Service plays out the dynamics this week:

"It's my hope," the governor said, "that the members will realize that their rules are of their own making, that they have it within their power to work a couple more days or, frankly, as long as it takes, to get this work done."

Little rankles like a work ethic charge, or being told as a legislator you've neglected your "moral obligation," as Patrick put it Thursday. And it came on the heels of the governor getting in Bob DeLeo's grill on Wednesday, visiting a charter school hard up against the speaker's district as he urged the House to pass the education bill, a choice of venue that DeLeo - unsolicited - later in the day said sounded "fascinating."

The education bill that cleared the Senate Monday allows new charter schools, more aggressive intervention into flunking schools, and creates a new class of schools with added administrative and curriculum flexibility. The governor likes it, and wants it hurried through on time for state access to up to $250 million in federal education grants. He also likes his budget-balancing bill, which closes an estimated $600 million gash in the budget, and doesn't like the Legislature's version, which protects the Quinn Bill and restores funding he vetoed for the courts and probation departments.

The week's unwritten story was that DeLeo basically came out Wednesday and embraced the education bill over doubts from some Democrats, a backdoor win for the governor that in the long run should be a much larger story than the six-week delay the speaker imposed - rightfully, said his members, who got the bill Wednesday as the clock on formal sessions for 2009 wound down.

The charge of leaving work with work still to be done also stung since it was lobbed at the tail end of an autumn that was promised by the speaker to be "busy," but which culminated Wednesday night with lawmakers sending Patrick only one significant piece of legislation: an act turning a pair of dog tracks into off-track betting parlors. A day later, the big guy got a budget remedy that he said came nowhere close to bringing the fiscal year into balance. Then the haymakers commenced. "The vulnerable populations we're trying to protect - they don't get to look the other way … It's their services at stake," Patrick said, knowing right where to plant it.

It's a contact sport.

"How does it make me feel inside? Sad," said one senior legislative Democrat, tongue in cheek. "It just makes me feel sad."

For DeLeo, it was a bit of a regime-shaping week. The governor gave him the opportunity to change his game, and the speaker responded. The speaker's uncharacteristically sour response, via a spokesman: "Governor Patrick's comments seem to be more about political necessity than 'moral obligation.' Speaker DeLeo's obligation is to the Commonwealth's schoolchildren - not Governor Patrick's political calendar."

--Mb