Arithmetic is just so dang inflexible

The political hamster wheel that is the Columbus Aquatic Center debate kept spinning Tuesday night. Presumably it will still be spinning when Columbus Council meets next Tuesday, and if recent performance is precedent, it will still be spinning when the meeting adjourns. But let hope spring eternal.

For a recap, you can pull up just about any story on the swim center for the past few months, because the narrative hasn’t changed:

Some people, including some members of council, insist the center must remain open 89 hours a week.

Others, including Parks and Rec Director James Worsley (before the center even opened) and the latest private contractor to offer a bid, say it will take at least $1.2 million to operate on that schedule.

The city has budgeted $825,000, which will keep the facility open only 45 hours a week.

That’s not long enough. There’s not enough money to keep it open longer. Options for shifting money around to fund 89 hours are unacceptable. But it has to stay open 89 hours a week. Which $825,000 won’t cover.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

If this back-to-square-one redundancy could be played out on a Monopoly board, we’d have to go through it only about 2,000 more times before we’d pass GO enough to collect the difference.

Urgent matters

As the 2016 session of the Georgia General Assembly nears its end, there apparently are still matters of critical importance to be dealt with in Atlanta.

For instance, we still haven’t quite nailed down exactly what religious “freedoms” Georgians can invoke against other Georgians, and under what circumstances; and the issue of letting suffering people, many of them children, have lawful access to a drug that can ease their pain and relieve their symptoms is still in political limbo while its champions try to get it past the usual dug-in Drug Warriors.

But there’s another pressing issue that Georgia lawmakers felt they had to address before being gaveled home for the year:

The U.S. Supreme Court.

The House Judiciary Committee approved HR 1612, which urges U.S. Sens. Johnny Isakson and David Perdue to hold firm in their commitment to block any Obama nominee.

Specifically, they must block any nominee “who does not share Justice [Antonin] Scalia’s philosophy of textualism in statutory interpretation and originalism in constitutional interpretation.”

There are more things wrong with this whole embarrassing joke than are worth dealing with here (though we’d be tempted to start by asking a few of the signatories to offer a coherent translation of the above).

Maybe the only funny part is that just the day before, in the context of the very religious “liberty” legislation mentioned above, a distinguished political leader reminded his fellow Georgians that federal matters are best dealt with at the federal level.

It was Johnny Isakson.

This story was originally published March 23, 2016 at 4:12 PM with the headline "Arithmetic is just so dang inflexible."