LITTLE THINGS MEAN a lot at the State House, and the House recently did a little thing that is worth applauding.

When representatives were ready to debate one of the hottest items of the year, a measure to regulate predatory lending, they passed over the bill that House leaders had introduced and instead debated the bill that the Senate had passed the previous week.

Now to people outside the State House, this just seems like common-sense efficiency: If one body has already passed a bill, that's the vehicle that the other body should use when it takes up the same topic. But this happens far too infrequently. Pride of authorship is a powerful thing. Institutional pride is at least as powerful, perhaps more so. And so senators usually ignore bills passed by the House, passing their own instead, and House members usually ignore bills passed by the Senate, passing their own instead. This produces a game of chicken that unnecessarily eats up legislative time, delays the passage of important legislation and leads to bad feelings all around.

Although there are structural reforms that could be put in place to deal with the problem, the best fix would be for legislators to routinely do what the House did on the predatory lending legislation.