Local lawmakers reflected Friday on the recently completed 2015 Mississippi Legislature.

Most were not pleased — and for good measure.

The supermajority of Republicans controlling the Legislature in many ways made a mockery of the process.

The Legislature was once a place where people of high character and ethical standards worked.

Based on the shenanigans coming out of Jackson this year, clearly, the group has fallen a notch or two — or 100 — from its high point.

Feeling as if they were being railroaded on many issues without much of a voice in the discussion — mainly because controlling Republicans took the stance that they knew best and all other opinions were not terribly welcome — members of the Senate and the House took desperate measures. They enacted a filibuster of sorts by demanding that all appropriations bills be read aloud, a process that took hours upon hours.

The move dragged the process down to a crawl and unintentionally ramped up the partisan tension even further.

Despite statewide acknowledgement that the state’s road and bridge infrastructure is badly in need of extra attention, nothing substantial was done to help.

By kicking the can down the proverbial road, lawmakers chose to simply hold the status quo longer. And these very same lawmakers claim to be “pro-job” and supportive of economic development, but they do little to physically improve the state. The solution, they mistakenly believe, is simply smaller government.

We’re fans of smaller government too, but we’d prefer a smaller government that invests wisely rather than merely willy-nilly, which is what we seem to have gotten in Jackson this year.