Upstate New York’s influence on the state legislature has been waning for years.

Of course, we all knew that. But a decision made at the start of the state legislative session is reducing your voice in the state Assembly to barely a whisper. Assemblywoman Crystal Peoples Stokes, D-Buffalo and Assembly majority leader, and her fellow Democrats passed a rules change limiting debate in legislation being considered on the Assembly floor to 16 of the Assembly’s 145 members and to only five minutes per member. Peoples-Stokes justified the move by reasoning the Assembly can pass more legislation if it spends less time on floor debates.

That may be true — but much of the legislation passing through the Assembly now is close to useless. The first month of the legislative session has seen 286 bills passed in the Assembly. Assembly members often rush through many of these bills because they are either for local issues relating to a specific Assembly district or they are non-controversial items that are passed with little opposition. Changing the Assembly rules isn’t about pushing through more legislation that most state residents don’t really care about.

It’s not even about helping Democrats get what they want. With a supermajority of both legislative chambers, Republicans can do very little to prevent Democrats from passing legislation outside of legal challenges.

Being a Republican in the state Legislature is about working behind the scenes to influence legislation and, if that doesn’t work, saying your piece on the Assembly floor so that the record can show your opposition. Democrats don’t want to hear that opposition any more, so they decided to change the Assembly’s rules to keep any opposition to an absolute minimum.

The bigger question is this — why spend so much time pushing legislation that aims to get as many people voting as possible only to silence the legislators they elect? Why should people vote if the chances are good their elected Assembly representative won’t be able to speak out on the major issues that come before the Assembly?

If Democrats really believed in the policies they are passing in the state Assembly, they wouldn’t be working so hard to limit debate on the big issues.