If you listen closely, you might be able to hear it, even from hundreds of miles away: Lawmakers at the Oregon Legislature, wailing and gnashing their teeth (perhaps even rending their garments) because bills they have sponsored are dead.

People tend to believe that a primary function of the Legislature is to pass important legislation. And that’s true.

But we tend to undervalue another valuable function of the Legislature: to kill bills.

That’s particularly important in the 35-day short sessions such as the one now underway in Salem. These sessions operate under such intense time pressure that there’s simply not sufficient time to adequately work through hundreds of bills, and to do so with the transparency and opportunity for public input that’s vital.

A quick check Monday on the indispensable Oregon Legislative Information System website suggested that, so far this session, legislators had filed 289 bills, resolutions and memorials. That’s roughly equal to the 2022 short session, when lawmakers filed 274 measures.

In the 2022 short session, according to news reports, more than 100 of those measures passed. That works out to a percentage of about 36%, which is a little higher than the marks in the 160-day sessions in 2021 (29%) and 2019 (25%).

That seems counterintuitive: It seems as if the percentage of passed bills should be lower in the shorter session, when lawmakers can argue that a controversial matter should be delayed until the longer session, which offers more time to consider an issue. (It could be that legislators tend to introduce less-controversial measures in the shorter sessions, a question that should be examined by a graduate political science student looking for a dissertation topic.)

But regardless of whether it’s the long session or the short one, the fact is that most bills die. Some are killed in very public ways. Some die lonely deaths in the corner of a darkened committee room.

The causes of death are varied. Sometimes a worthy bill is buried by measures deemed more pressing by legislators. Sometimes a bill requires more than one session to get traction in the Legislature. Sometimes a bill gets killed as part of a deal involving other legislation.

And sometimes a proposed piece of legislation is just a bad idea.

A key deadline in the short session came earlier this week: If a measure had not received a work session in a committee by the end of the day on Monday, it was theoretically dead. (“Theoretically” because the halls of the Capitol are filled with dead bills that somehow lurch back to life, like another spinoff of “The Walking Dead.”)

All of this illuminates something important that we tend to forget about the legislative process: It can be difficult to get a piece of legislation through the Legislature. And that’s the way it should be.

We’re not talking about measures that no one would object to, such as making the potato an official state vegetable — oh, wait: That one did generate some heat.

We’re talking about measures that tackle some of the state’s most pressing issues. This session, for example, may come close to biting off more than it can chew with its twin priorities of increasing housing production and working to ease the state’s addiction crisis.

With those two issues taking center stage in this session — which already is down to just about three weeks — many other issues likely will be delayed until next year’s longer session. That can be frustrating.

But it’s better than having lawmakers rush to approve measures that needed more time and attention than they got in a short session.