A couple of years ago, Bill Lockyer, the veteran politician who is now the state treasurer, showed up in the Capitol to scold legislators for their preoccupation with trivia.

"Sorry, but two-thirds of the bills that I see come out of the Assembly, if they never saw the light of day, God bless it," Lockyer said.

"Just stop it. I mean they're junk. And they're consuming all your staff time with junk."

Lawmakers didn't take kindly to the words from Lockyer, a one-time president pro tem of the state Senate. If anything, the Legislature became even more consumed with junk legislation – small beer favors for special interests, symbolic gestures and naked publicity-seeking.

Not surprisingly, the Legislature's image suffered. With the state mired in recession, its approval rate among voters stands somewhere in the teens.

As the 2011 session began, legislative leaders vowed to balance the budget and take steps to improve the stagnant economy. With Democrat Jerry Brown in the governorship, Democratic majorities in both legislative houses and the two-thirds vote requirement for budgets repealed by voters, they said, the stage was set for big action on big issues.

It didn't happen.

The budget was balanced only on paper with the gimmicks and creative bookkeeping that Brown had pledged to shun, and has been slowly falling apart ever since. Instead of attacking the state's thorniest issues – such as education, water supply highway congestion and tax reform – the session quickly deteriorated into business as usual, handing out goodies to the politically influential.

During the hectic last hours of the session, which ended after 1 a.m. Saturday, Brown's largely symbolic stab at economic stimulus through a corporate tax shuffle died. The Legislature passed a very limited streamlining of the state's environmental permitting process whose real world economic impact is not likely to be large – or perhaps even noticeable.

Most of the bills that coursed through the Capitol during the session's final days were the sort of junk that Lockyer decried.

Brown, in fact, channeled Lockyer when he remarked to reporters, late in the session, "While you guys are home with your families, I'm plowing through a mountain of bills that really should not see the light of day."

He punctuated that remark by vetoing several measures, saying of one, "Not every human problem deserves a law."

Brown, for political reasons, will undoubtedly sign the vast majority of bills that are flowing to his desk, but one suspects that he'll also disappoint some fellow Democrats by vetoing their pet measures.

Quite a few of the late bills would directly benefit labor unions, his party's most important political ally and a major contributor to his campaign last year, and it will be fascinating to see what he does about them.

© Copyright The Sacramento Bee. All rights reserved.

Call The Bee's Dan Walters, (916) 321-1195. Back columns, www.sacbee.com/walters

• Read more articles by Dan Walters