LAWMAKERS CAN improve public health and safety and shore up the State Retirement System before the session ends Thursday if they focus on the big picture rather than a quest to get their way.

There’s so much room for compromise on bills to let police enforce the seat belt law, end the state mandate on stiff drinks, fight teen smoking and reform the pension system that the inability to get them passed will mean legislators didn’t want to get the job done.

The only significant differences between the House and Senate versions of the seat belt bill are the size of the fine and a Senate provision that prohibits police issuing seat belt tickets at safety checks.

Continuing to prohibit tickets at roadblocks is ridiculous, but it’s not important enough to fight over. Let’s make this one easy: Take the House version on one contested item and the Senate version on the other. It doesn’t matter that much which way lawmakers go. What matters is finally letting police enforce the law, which will save lives and increase respect for the law.

Deep-pocketed special interests are getting in the way of the other highway-safety bill, as lawmakers squabble over how liquor will be distributed to bars and restaurants once they abolish the minibottle requirement. The Senate wants bars to keep buying from 58 special dealers that managed to keep the stiff-drink mandate in place so long, while the House would let bars buy directly from the wholesalers who sell liquor to dealers. Senators say the dealers might go out of business if bars bought directly from the wholesalers.

The Senate’s concerns simply do not justify state interference with the marketplace. But that’s not important when compared to the amount of damage that is being done every day that we continue to force bartenders to serve the strongest drinks in the country. The public voted by an overwhelming 59 percent to allow free pour of liquor. Lawmakers must not leave town this week without carrying out the will of the people.

The differences between House and Senate proposals to finally make it illegal for kids to smoke are even less significant. The Senate wants to restrict vending machine sales of cigarettes as well as punishing kids who light up. That’s a very good idea, but like a free-market liquor system, it’s less important than the primary bill: As long as we keep looking the other way when kids smoke, South Carolina will continue to be one of the top teen-smoking states in the nation, and our kids will keep plunging themselves into an addiction that will result in slow, lingering and, often for the rest of us, expensive deaths.

The only difficult negotiations are over the retirement system. If it isn’t fixed next week, retirees won’t receive their annual cost-of-living increases this summer. Some provisions in both the House and Senate bills are intolerable. The trick is taking the best of both: Increase employee contributions to the pension system, make TERI employees at-will and force the state to include COLAs in its calculation of the system’s solvency, as the House prefers; keep the state contributions where they are and create a panel to oversee both stock and bond investments, as the Senate proposes.

There’s no reason legislators can’t get all of these bills passed this week if they truly want to. And if they don’t want to, they probably shouldn’t be legislators.