Democrats don’t have a lot of influence in the General Assembly these days. They hold roughly one-third of the seats in both the House and Senate, which means the Republican majority can safely ignore them 99 percent of the time. Last week, however, presented one of those rare situations where the GOP leadership needed the Democratic minority to move one of the most important pieces of legislation this session: the transportation tax bill (House Bill 170) that would revise the gasoline excise tax and raise nearly $1 billion annually to maintain the state’s highways.