As the Christmas tune doesn’t go, it’s beginning to look a lot like Session. As in New Mexico Legislative Session 2025. Whoo-hoo!

Here’s that annual pre-MLK Day reminder to look at the bills filed pre-Session. So far there are 65 bills and resolutions (all House) showing up on the actually rather nice NMLegis website. Every year about this time I look and come up with my favorite pre-file and the one I consider the dumbest. My fave so far is Representative Gail Armstrong’s House Bill 65, which would add the bolded below to existing legislation on required preK-12 school days/hours:

“Except as otherwise provided in this section, students shall be in school programs, exclusive of lunch, for a minimum of one thousand one hundred forty instructional hours per year, except half-day kindergarten, which shall have five hundred fifty instructional hours per year; provided that the local school board of a school district or governing body of a charter school shall determine the total number of instructional days per year and the number of instructional days per week that students shall be in school programs.“

Thus, Armstrong’s bill might be subtitled: NM PED Get Off Our Ass. Admittedly, this doesn’t make for a very good/catchy acronym (NMPEDGOOA). The bill is the legislative rejoinder to the Public Education Department’s ham-fisted and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to create a rule dictating universal five-day school weeks.

No really stupid pre-file has emerged, imho, to this point. One can only hope that something as epically dumb as last year’s “Necrophilia is Bad” (*NIB) bill will emerge (like the undead) soon from the wacky mind-crypts of folks like Representatives Stephanie Lord and/or John Block. They both won re-election in ’24 post-NIB and must feel they now have a veritable NIB mandate to successfully thwart and subdue the ultra-powerful pro-necrophilia lobby.

Closest either Lord or Block can come so far is Block’s evocatively written “Harmful Materials Harm Young People” bill, which defines “harmful material” thusly :

“B. “material harmful to minors” means material that:

                (1) the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find, taking the material as a whole and with respect to minors, is designed to appeal or pander to prurient interests;

                (2) exploits, is devoted to or principally consists of descriptions of actual, simulated or animated displays or depictions of any of the following, in a manner patently offensive with respect to minors:

                     (a) the nipple of the female breast, pubic hair, the anus, the vulva or genitals;

                     (b) touching, caressing or fondling of nipples, breasts, buttocks, the anus or genitals; or

                     (c) sexual intercourse, masturbation, sodomy, bestiality, oral copulation, flagellation, excretory functions, exhibitions of a sexual act and any other sexual act; and

                (3) taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political and scientific value for minors.”

To say the term “average person” is doing some very heavy lifting there is great understatement. It is also safe to say that Rep. Block: A. Has a lot of time on his hands to think of what personally disgusts him as an (undoubtedly, it goes without saying) “average person” ; B. Considers “the nipple of the female breast” as a slippery slope (ahem) to bestiality.

Stupidly bad, Rep. Block…but you can do worse. Talk to Rep. Lord..she’s sure to have some godawful ideas.

Meanwhile, happy Session (it’s a 60-Dayer!) to all who celebrate/participate/spectate.

*Yes, you’re absoulutely right perceptive BB reader: This is a Black Sabbath reference.