Senator Ogden’s speech to the Senate about the state’s budget challenges, which included his concerns about the target revenue system, the business margins tax, and Medicaid, caused me to wonder whether it would be wise to delay the budget debate until a mid-summer special session. But Senator Robert Duncan, a fixture on the Senate conference committee, thinks this would be a mistake. This was his argument: In a special session, there is only one thing on the agenda. In a regular session, there are hundreds of issues on the agenda. It is much easier to engage in the negotiating that leads to a final budget bill when lawmakers are concerned about a multitude of issues, rather than just one, because some of those issues can be used for tradeoffs on the budget. Makes sense to me.