Legislative leaders at the state Capitol are so good at saving money, they have managed to stash a whopping $211 million surplus over the years.

Only trouble is, they don't give any of it back to taxpayers.

Each year, the legislature appropriates itself money to run its operations. For the fiscal year that ended in June, the General Assembly spent $308 million.

But in many years, legislators don't spend all that they budget. Unused money is put in their kitty.

For the last 20 years or so, the legislature has hoarded prodigiously. But legislative leaders have grown even more greedy in recent years.

At the end of fiscal 2004-05, the surplus stood at $161 million. In the last two years alone, they squirreled away an additional $50 million.

This is the slush fund that has enabled Democratic and Republican leaders to pay for a bacchanalia of bad ideas.

They've spent huge sums on political polling, early pay raises for legislators, and five-figure bonuses to legislative staffers.

The state attorney general is investigating whether those bonuses violated the law by rewarding staffers for political campaign work.

No other branch of state government is permitted to amass a surplus. The governor and judiciary must return any unspent money to the state treasury.

What a concept.

Defenders of the legislature's surplus argue that the stash of cash is an insurance policy. For example, if the governor vetoed their operating expenses, legislators could keep the General Assembly running for up to nine months.

Of course, the legislature's performance in recent years is the perfect argument in favor of closing it down from time to time.

A House-Senate audit advisory commission has recommended that the General Assembly return most of the surplus to the state treasury. The question is now in the hands of House and Senate leaders, who should act swiftly.

This one is a no-brainer.

Rep. Josh Shapiro (D., Montgomery), the commission's chairman, suggested directing $160 million of the surplus to fund the first year of a House bill to provide health insurance to more Pennsylvanians. Great idea. Or the money could go back to the treasury, to help reduce the burden on taxpayers.

However this surplus is reallocated, it shouldn't be sitting in a pot for legislative leaders to play with.