There are a lot of big problems in West Virginia, whether it’s public health, education, clean water, available jobs, addiction — the list is long.
Republicans have held a supermajority in the state Legislature since 2021 and it’s done nothing but grow. Yet, a lot of the big problems facing the state remain unaddressed or at least not significantly examined.
Instead, there are bills about renaming Spruce Knob to “Trump Mountain,†or defining men and women and where they can and can’t go, or even whether it’s legal to stand up while riding a motorcycle.
Speaking of, the House of Delegates spent an inordinate amount of time this week debating whether motorcyclists should be required to wear helmets as part of an amendment to the standing while riding bill. As of now, state law says helmets are required. Some lawmakers apparently want to change that, and they’re highly and weirdly passionate about it.
The Democratic Caucus in the House (only nine of the 100 House members are Democrats) released a video featuring some of the moments of the debate from Republican lawmakers, including Delegate Brandon Steele, R-Raleigh, arguing that McDonald’s kills more people with unhealthy food than riding a motorcycle without a helmet does.
“Ronald McDonald has killed a whole lot more people than a motorcycle crash, and that’s no accident,†he said.
Huh?
Steele even shamed his colleagues, saying he sees them going to McDonald’s and Taco Bell to eat. Who knew that was a crime?
Delegate George Street, R-Preston, made it known he despises seat belts.
Delegate Kathy Hess Crouse, R-Putnam, said on behalf of herself, “These curls do not do hats or helmets.â€
Like a lot of things debated in the Legislature lately, the issue seemed to center around freedom of choice being more important than safety.
Delegate Larry Kump, R-Berkeley, summed this up by reading the Benjamin Franklin quote, “They who give up essential liberty to purchase a little safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.â€
Of course, Franklin wasn’t talking about motorcycle helmets. He wasn’t talking about government suppression of individual rights either.
As scholar Benjamin Wittes put it in an interview nearly 10 years ago, when the quote was used to object to certain regulations around cellphone data, “It is a quotation that defends the authority of a legislature to govern in the interests of collective security. It means, in context, not quite the opposite of what it’s almost always quoted as saying but much closer to the opposite than to the thing that people think it means.â€
But why let context get in the way?
The amendment was rejected, but the lengthy debate is the type of thing that sometimes makes it difficult to take lawmakers seriously, or to trust them when they are handling matters of much greater substance.
