The marvelous thing about mediocrity is that almost anyone can achieve it, even the Oregon Legislature.

A well-worn route to mediocrity is to try to do too much. Legislators inflicted that upon themselves this session. They introduced more than 3,500 bills. That total is the most in decades.

“This has been a session like no other,” Erik Kancler, a lobbyist for the city of Bend, told Bend City Councilors on Wednesday. “We have never had so many bills.”

If you want a guarantee legislators and legislative staff don’t have time for details, if you want to guarantee there is a shortage of testimony, analysis and debate, if you want to guarantee the public cannot track what is going on in their government, flood the zone with bills.

There is no cap on how many bills a legislator can introduce during long sessions. And there is a surplus of problems and pet peeves that legislators would like to address. Legislators don’t get rewarded for exercising bill-introducing discipline. In fact, the perverse incentive may be for legislators to introduce more bills to be seen as a legislator doing more stuff.

House Bill 2006, introduced this week, would put limits on how many bills a legislator could introduce in a long session. It would limit legislators to 25 in most instances. It provides for exceptions.

State Sen. Anthony Broadman and state Rep. Emerson Levy, both Bend Democrats, are among the bill’s sponsors. Republicans and Democrats support the bill.

There are at least two possible explanations why legislators took action on this issue. Reason one: Legislators read our editorial from last week about too many bills this session. Reason two: Legislators arrived at the same conclusion we did on their own.

Obviously we would like to think that reason one is the answer because of our vast influence. Alas, that is almost certainly not true.

We don’t really care why. Legislators should just pass the bill, if they can find the time among the 3,500 others.