In a debate over a bill about death, rules took center stage.
The Senate resumed discussion on Tuesday of S.77, a bill that allows people with less than six months left to live to self-administer a lethal dose of medicine, prescribed by a doctor.
After hours of back-and-forth, one of the original bill’s foremost supporters, Sen. Claire Ayer, D-Addison, asked that the discussion be postponed until Wednesday. The motion, which the Senate acquiesced to in a 16-14 vote, signals that there’s still a chance for compromise.
At this point there appears to be two senators still on the fence — Sen. Peter Galbraith, D-Windham, and Sen. Robert Hartwell, D-Bennington. Several of the votes on S.77 ended in a 15-15 ties, with Galbraith and Hartwell siding with opponents but expressing some willingness to cede to supporters if some of their concerns were addressed.
S.77 underwent a radical transformation, provoked by an amendment from Galbraith, before passing in the Senate in mid-February. It was then sent to the House, which restored it to the original version, and it is now back in the Senate. The House bill outlines a detailed procedure for doctors to prescribe lethal medication to a terminally ill patient. The version that passed in the Senate the first time around simply grants immunity to a doctor who has prescribed such a medication.
Back in February, the Senate entertained extensive debate on the substance of the issue at hand, and at times the discussion Tuesday veered back into familiar territory and senators debated the merits of setting up a state-sanctioned process for ending one’s life.
But for the most part, the debate was a procedural dance where senators were concerned less with persuading their fellow lawmakers — most of whom have already made up their minds — than they were with commandeering the procedural nuances of floor debate.
That proved a matter of timing as much as tactics, and the discussion was frequently punctuated by requests for recesses so senators could be sure they weren’t sabotaging their chances of saving or killing the bill by offering a motion prematurely.
At one point, one of the bill’s primary opponents, Sen. Richard Sears, D-Bennington, commented, “The entire debate of this bill is unusual, to say the least.”
Before the debate, Hartwell drafted an amendment that was a hybrid of the House bill and Senate version — it kept some of the safeguards from the former, but it shortened the length of the terminal diagnoses from six months to live to three months.
Though Hartwell’s amendment was first in the queue, he chose not to offer it when the opportunity arose. Sen. David Zuckerman, P-Chittenden, snatched the opportunity and offered Hartwell’s amendment himself. Zuckerman, who later admitted that he wouldn’t actually support the amendment himself, said he made that move to show the undecided voters — namely Hartwell and Galbraith — that the amendment couldn’t pass, in the hopes that would convert them into supporters of an amendment Ayer planned to offer. Hartwell’s amendment failed, but Ayer failed to win over either senator.
Ayer’s amendment, which followed Zuckerman’s, offered what she called a “streamlined version” of the House bill, while keeping all the necessary safeguards in place. Ayer said that by cutting out some details specified in the bill, such as some medical forms, she hoped to bring on board some of the senators who objected it on the grounds that “it felt less intrusive into the doctor-patient relation” and was “too cumbersome and too legislation heavy.”
That amendment failed 16-15, with Lt. Gov. Phil Scott casting the tie-breaking vote, which mirrored the Senate’s vote on the bill back in February.
But just when it seemed that the stalemate would prevail, a glimmer of concession appeared. Ayer announced that she’d heard a promising proposal during one of the scores of recesses, and she wanted more time to draft another amendment. Galbraith and Hartwell provided the swing votes needed to back her motion, and so the Senate will return to the subject tomorrow.
Galbraith declined to elaborate on what sort of compromise he might strike with Ayer.
The machinations actually began much earlier, in the morning, when the Senate Health and Welfare Committee reviewed the amendments from Hartwell and Ayer and discussed what their best shot was at getting a bill through the Senate. After a certain point, Ayer, the committee chair, closed the doors on reporters and lobbyists who had been listening in.
Ayer was acting on the advice of Jennifer Carbee, a member of the Legislative Council, who passed her a note mid-discussion, informing her that she could eject people from the room and ask for legal advice from Carbee within the privacy of her committee.
That’s not quite right, according to Senate Clerk John Bloomer. According to Bloomer, Ayer should have made a motion to call an executive session and then put it up to the committee for a vote. Bloomer ran through the situations that warrant an executive session and soliciting legal advice wasn’t among them. That, he suggested, might be better suited for a one-on-one conversation with counsel.
Sears echoed Bloomer’s opinion, saying he didn’t think committees could orchestrate private meetings in that fashion.
