Legislators in Olympia faced the first cutoff of the session this week: Policy committees had to vote bills out of committee or else the bills would be dead. Lefty bills that would create a state bank and ban plastic bags look like they're dead, while a pro-choice bill, one that requires health insurers to cover abortion if they also cover maternity care, is alive.

Meanwhile, a bill to help provide dental care for low-income seniors and kids is alive and a bill to gut the voter-approved renewable energy act is dead.

But bills don't just live and die—some get completely rewritten; or to stick with the metaphor, die and come back to life as something entirely different.

And that brings us to today's Jolt. We've gotta make conservative state Sen. Dan Swecker (R-20)—the ranking Republican on the government operations committee— today's loser.

Sure, Swecker's omnibus 70-page "city and county fiscal relief" bill—which came with a hodgepodge of attacks on liberals (it saved costs by undermining collective bargaining rights and gutted stormwater regulations) made it out of committee. But only after the bill was completely rewritten by government operations committee chair Sen. Craig Pridemore (D-49, Vancouver).

Trimmed down to a little more than one page, all the bill does now is create a health care task force that must report back to the legislature with ideas on providing efficient public health services.