I concur with Monique about the Speaker of the General Assembly House Bill Murphy’s suggestion that the legislature is a full-time occupation, but it was a different line of his that caught my eye when I read that article:

“We said in January that the budget was going to be the issue this year and it was,” Murphy said early Saturday morning. “I think once we got that over with Wednesday night, Thursday morning, people have had a long month, the Fourth of July is next week, we need a couple weeks to cool off.”

“Cool off”? Somehow I can’t help but wonder if — during a year of tea parties and coalescing opposition groups and local taxpayer organizations — the objective wouldn’t be more accurately characterized as permitting the attention of difficult constituents to drift off: to let the summer doldrums settle in, vacations to drain the ground troops (so to speak), and a few weeks of hiatus to change the topics on folks’ minds.