AN ASTOUNDING amount of anger is being directed at freshman Sen. John Kuhn, whose session-ending quasi-mini-filibuster blocked the passage of a bill our research universities say is critical to reviving our state's economy.

I can understand the anger. Sen. Kuhn makes himself a convenient target. He frequently makes excellent points; he often makes them very well. But as we all were supposed to have learned in kindergarten, it doesn't matter how smart you are if no one wants to play with you. And by refusing to choose his fights, by insisting that he simply must share his thoughts on every topic about which he has thoughts -- in short, by turning his 15 minutes of fame into weeks -- he is quickly becoming an irrelevant nuisance.

But if legislators want to affix blame for the delay of the university/economic development bill, they need to look in the mirror. Sen. Kuhn merely took advantage of a situation his colleagues handed him. Worse, it's not the first time -- nor is it likely to be the last time -- this has happened.

The situation ripe for abuse: the tendency of the Senate and, to a lesser degree, the House to put off major initiatives until the last minute.

To the extent that there is a rational reason for this, and not just procrastination, it is one that flies in the face of good government: If the issue is big enough, and you delay it long enough, you can often make the opposition melt away, and pass the bill with little debate and less danger of having to compromise, because most people don't want to be blamed for killing a major initiative -- i.e., to be in Sen. Kuhn's position.

The most infamous example of this gamble backfiring occurred in 1994, when the Senate and nearly all the interested parties agreed to a compromise on the Confederate flag. But they waited until the next-to-last day of the legislative session to send the bill to the House. That allowed a single person to kill it by insisting that the House observe a rule that requires it to wait at least two days before debating new legislation.

It was a series of similar gambles that doomed the university legislation. Only this was more inexcusable. At least with the flag, the bill was still being crafted up until it was sent over to the House.

The bill Sen. Kuhn blocked would create financial incentives to lure biotech businesses to the state, set up a venture capital fund to finance high-risk start-ups, increase universities' borrowing authority and make it easier for universities to form partnerships with private businesses.

Although the universities had been talking for months about how essential it was for the Legislature to approve some of these measures, they waited until April to have a bill introduced.

That was a problem, but not a huge one, because the House passed it in three weeks. Then, like most House bills, it went to the Senate and sat. And sat.

Most of us assumed it was dead. But not Senate Finance Chairman Hugh Leatherman, who called a rare late-session meeting of his committee on the Tuesday before the Senate was to adjourn and reported the bill out to the full Senate. That made it child's play for a senator to kill it -- especially in a Senate whose work ethic has slowly but steadily declined over the past decade.

Sen. Kuhn, acting alone, wouldn't have stood a chance under the wait-'em-out method the Senate used to employ to stop these little baby filibusters: After a dozen or more consecutive hours of holding the podium, the speaker will either 1) say everything he wants to say and give up gracefully or 2) keel over from exhaustion or 3) succumb to the call of nature. End of filibuster.

But this only works if the Senate is willing to spend some time in session waiting out the speaker, making the filibuster painful for the person conducting it. And for several years now, this Senate has been unwilling to do that, instead collectively throwing up its hands after an hour or so and going home. So senators who want to can tie the Senate in knots without even straining their voice. (This also invites the more abusive effortless filibuster, in which one senator simply objects to a bill, and it isn't debated without a super-majority vote.)

Absent such stick-to-itiveness, though, this situation still could have been avoided, by simply getting the bill up for debate sooner. Sen. Leatherman says he was too tied up with the Senate's month-long -- and ultimately fruitless -- debate of the state budget to do that. Perhaps he truly had intended to get to it earlier. But it's hard to forget that this is the Senate's modus operandi.

But the reason the Senate took a month on the budget is that senators weren't willing to put in the hours to finish it sooner. I remember spending late nights in the State House as senators debated the budget. Mondays (including Memorial Day). Fridays. Saturdays, even. This year, senators worked only one Monday, no Fridays and no Saturdays. That alone doubled the number of weeks needed to get through 11 days of debate. They did pull one late-nighter; but they spread 60 hours of debate (85 if you count the time they were negotiating behind closed doors) over parts of four weeks. They used to put in that many hours on the budget in a week.

Yes, Sen. Kuhn is the proximate cause of the economic development bill's delay. But the routine, reckless habits of the General Assembly -- and particularly the Senate -- are the ultimate cause. And until those are changed, this sort of thing is going to continue to happen.