Republican complaints about executive-branch boards and commissions establishing by rules what the Legislature already had rejected raise an interesting issue.

After all, lawmakers, by virtue of their having been elected by the voters, always have a more direct legitimacy than appointed board members.

But is that the point?

After all, board and commissions, especially those with constitutional standing, are specifically required to act in the public interest in their areas of authority and expertise. Like the Legislature, they take testimony in open hearings, but they also can take all the time they need to bring to bear scientific and other evidence. Legislators, burdened by hundreds of bills and a 90-day deadline, simply cannot do that.

And, perhaps as important, boards and commissions, while hardly apolitical, operate at a far cooler temperature than the partisan cauldron that is a legislative session.

The biggest GOP peeve at the moment concerns the Board of Public Education's passage of a requirement for rules on school bullies. The House rejected a similar idea on a strictly party-line 50-50 vote, with Republicans refusing to go along with what some of them call a "homosexual agenda." Leaving aside the question of whether the goal of being treated like everybody else is a dangerous agenda, the fact remains that the vote was purely political in nature. The board, which has said all along it has both the power and duty to address what it has identified as a serious bullying problem in public schools, was under political pressure too. But its decision was based on the needs of school children, not a political ideology.

Likewise, in considering regulations for power plants and coal-bed natural gas wells that had been rejected by the Legislature, the Board of Environmental Review is putting much more time into its study than lawmakers could hope to spend during a session.

Legislators complaining about these issues insist that Montanans are upset about boards grabbing legislative powers. But besides the party faithful, we have to wonder how many of them really are.