It’s time for installment 431 (please note, all numbers in this column are fictional) in our award-winning (I’m afraid that’s also fiction) 2,700-part series called “How Does A Bill Become Law – And Why Should You Care?”

The short answers are:

Mostly it doesn’t and mostly you shouldn’t.

Of the approximately 8,415,712 pieces of legislation that will be introduced in the 2015 legislative session, about half will be referred to the Joint Standing Committee on Solid Waste, Garbage Disposal and Document Shredding, after which they’ll be converted into mulch.

Among the measures that meet this fate are any proposals concerning stuff that’s already been tried and failed miserably, but that some senators and representatives with the memory capacity of my living-room couch insist on reviving. In this category, we find bills from conservatives to ban abortion; outlaw same-sex marriage; and reinstitute Prohibition, the death penalty and buggy-whip manufacturing. Then there are offerings from liberal activists to create a single-payer health care system, require all crops grown in the state be organic and provide welfare to anyone who asks for it – even if they’re just visiting Maine for the weekend.

The number of potential laws is further winnowed down by combining some bills. For instance, legislation with a vague title such as “An Act Dealing With Electrical Usage” could be merged with an overly specific one like “An Act to Require Electrodes Be Attached to the Sexual Organs of Time Warner Cable Executives And That Said Electrodes Be Activated Each Time Rates Increase or Complaints About Service Are Ignored.” These two measures could be further integrated into another piece of legislation called “An Act to Increase State Revenues by Making the Lottery More Sadistic.” In the final version of this document, winners of the new “Maine Mega-Watts” game would be allowed to throw the switch sending electrical current wherever it would cause the most pain.

Other bills are simply disregarded, by which I mean assigned to the Joint Standing Committee Composed of Doofuses, Dingbats and Doo-Doo Brains (this is an actual committee, although it has another, less accurate name). These measures include anything sponsored by the Portland delegation, anything with long words in the title and anything that resulted from a study the last Legislature commissioned in order to avoid dealing with some difficult issue.

By the time all this has been accomplished, the actual number of bills awaiting legislative action has been reduced to a manageable number. A couple of the survivors will be proposals to create an official state something. Unless you care about which prehistoric beastie gets the honor of becoming the state’s official fossil (it’s not M.D. Harmon, but a primitive fern called Pertica quadrifaria that lived 390 million years ago in the early stages of John Martin’s political career), the official state herb (no, not marijuana, but wintergreen) or the official state soil (Chesuncook, better known as “plain old dirt”), you have no reason to pay attention to these debates.

The remaining bills will include the state budget, a few controversial things introduced by the governor with the promise he’ll throw one hell of a tantrum if they don’t pass, and bills drawn up by cozy groups of special interests and members of legislative leadership designed to make Maine a better place for all of us – if by “all of us” you mean special interests and legislative leaders.

Under the complex rules governing the lawmaking process, none of these measures will come up for debate until the final weeks of the session in June, when lawmakers will be forced to work long hours crafting compromises they could just as easily have arrived at in February.

But if our elected representatives did that, they’d have to go back to their home districts, day jobs and families. When compared to those options, spending six months in Augusta must look pretty good.

So they hang around, holding public hearings on bills that have no chance of becoming law (“An Act to Let the Legislature Stay in Session All Year Long”), putting out press releases (“Rep. Choogles Be?arnaise Appointed to the Special Commission to Study Difficult Issues the Legislature Doesn’t Want to Deal With”) and holding news conferences that no reporter would be caught dead attending (“We are here today to endorse Good and condemn Evil – unless Evil has a change of heart and supports my bill to create an Official State Rodent”).

Most of this would be unnecessary if our legislators had the courage to pass a single bill titled “An Act to Attach Electrodes to the Sexual Organs of the Governor, the President of the Senate, the Speaker of the House and Relevant Committee Chairs to Be Activated Any Time These Personages Utter Phrases Such As ‘State Shutdown,’ ‘Tax Increase,’ ‘We’re Doing the People’s Work’ or Other Self-Serving Nonsense.”

I move we adjourn. Objections may be emailed to aldiamon@herniahill.net.