[I]f last Saturday night’s midnight madness is any indication, there could be more procedural shenanigans in store this legislative session.
When the House Republicans refused Friday to suspend the rules and effectively blocked a vote on changes to school spending thresholds, House Speaker Shap Smith didn’t blink. He insisted that lawmakers come back at 12:01 a.m. for a vote.
A non-adjournment witching hour session is unheard of, and the fact that it occurred in the very first month of the session is not a good sign for lawmakers who like regular sleep intervals.
It’s been at least 25 years since lawmakers last darkened the door of the Statehouse for a midnight session, and the price tag for the late night soiree was somewhere between $10,000 and $27,000, depending on where legislators ate dinner and dossed down for the night.
Smith downplayed the pushback from the House GOP. “To me, it doesn’t seem much more than usual,” he said. What drove the late-night vote he said was an external deadline — the urgency of getting a decision to school boards who need to warn budgets this week for Town Meeting Day.
In the end, both sides — the House Dems and the House GOP — claimed victory. The Dems won the vote by a wide margin, while the Republicans declared in an email blast that the Dems “forced a vote to raise school spending and property taxes.”
“It’s more important to get this right than to get this right away,” Turner said. “This is not procedural nonsense, as some have said. It’s the right thing to do.”
The House GOP said it was necessary to delay the vote until Tuesday even though the previous week they had argued that the bill was taking too long in committee and needed to be pushed ahead as soon as possible so that school districts could plan.
Dems say the procedural wrangling was a red herring — a gratuitous opportunity for the GOP to take a stand and then turn around and say the Dems raised property taxes.
Ah, politics. Expect a lot more of it as the session wanes on and election season begins to really kick in at the Statehouse. The minority reps have found the rulebook, and there will likely be more procedural theatrics to come. Tactics that haven’t seen the light of day in decades could come into vogue between now and the end of the session.
But for this week, at least, the House Chamber will be fairly quiet and the action will be in committee. House Appropriations is taking up the human services section of the governor’s budget and is effectively interviewing every commissioner in the Agency of Human Services. Meanwhile, changes to workers’ compensation are under consideration in the House Commerce and Economic Development Committee and House Ways and Means is looking at the estate tax, the governor’s proposed increase in mutual fund fees, and a 2.35 percent provider tax on dentists and independent doctors.
A controversial paid sick leave bill has been watered down enough that it looks like it will pass through the Senate this week. The Senate Finance Committee is also taking up the provider tax. And Sen. Dick Sears is looking at a new provision that could criminalize verbal threats to social workers and mandatory child abuse reporters.
