Suicide Pill

Now that the legislative sessions are just around the corner, most SMROs are busy crafting bills to make motorcycling better. And the perennial debate is what to include in the next helmet law repeal bill. In other words, what compromises are needed?

These decisions are best left to the legislators that sponsor the bill. For one thing, they are the pros. Lawmaking is what they do for a living, and that means meeting their colleagues half-way. They know what to leave in, and what to leave out. Only progress counts, so they find a way to make it to the finish line.

Bikers, on the other hand, are amateurs when it comes to lawmaking. They haggle with each other about the conditions and compromises in the bill language, such as age, training, experience, and insurance requirements.

When it comes to the language of the bill, bikers compromise with other bikers. But when it comes to what lawmakers will accept, bikers can only guess. That's because bikers are on the outside looking in. They don't have the same view OR ability as a legislator. But that sure doesn't stop them from trying.

As I've always said, build a biker-friendly majority first ... and then the repeal bill will pass itself. Some compromise may be necessary to get over the hump. As a rule of thumb, the greater the majority, the cleaner the bill.

But there is one repeal bill condition that is pure poison. It's commonly called a "sunset clause," where a repeal bill will automatically expire after a couple of years. This is really a suicide pill, because it's totally destructive to biker's rights.

For one thing, it does all the work for our opponents. In fact, it does a better job than they could possibly do themselves. After all, they don't have to lift a finger to bring back the universal helmet law.

Better still, they'll have ripe data to cherry pick, easily showing how statewide fatalities skyrocketed. Bikers can't debate their way out of that corner. If you want to find repeal after this, you'd better bring a shovel.

Instant gratification is never a good thing, but that's exactly why struggling SMROs take this step. It's out of desperation. They aren't strong enough to fight the battle, and they aren't forward-thinking enough to build a majority. So they cheat.

But they are only cheating the very bikers they're supposed to represent. And the price bikers pay is steep. The immediate yet temporary gain pushes victory further out of reach. Like a desperate junkie, they get one quick fix ... destroying the future for a momentary pleasure.

Fortunately, no state legislature has ever passed a "sunset" repeal bill. Not yet, anyway. But a suicide pill is just the most obvious symptom of something else that's very wrong.

The real problem is that the wrong people are running your SMRO ... right into the ground.

Good luck fixing that.

- RIDE2REPEAL@gmail.com