Legislative Work

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Will the 2009 legislature wait until the last moment to tackle the problems facing the state? Will there be a special session? How will the budget come out?

I’m not a prophet, so I can’t answer those questions with any degree of certainty, but I can tell you some things about the process.

The legislature will not wait until the last moment to tackle the problems facing the state. They are already working on them. The trouble is, the media will focus on only one or two problems, and those will be the most intractable. Some years that is education; most years it includes abortion and the death penalty; every year it is the budget.

The budget, which is the 800-pound gorilla of legislation of every session, is this year the 800-pound gorilla and his brother Bob. Not only do the legislators have to reconcile competing proposals for next year’s budget, they must re-reconcile the budget for this year. The governor has put forward her proposal; the Republicans have put forward theirs. The Democratic legislators, for once, are being supportive of the governor by not putting forward a different one for themselves.

The two proposals for next year are actually mostly in agreement. No one is arguing for cutting essential services like the State Highway Patrol or mandating across-the-board cuts in all services. Instead, they are making changes around the margins, for the most part.

But changes around the margins aren’t going to take care of this year’s budget problems. The governor has proposed cuts that will pare some waste and overlap, but the Republicans want to cut things to the bone. The difference is $150 million – and that’s real money in a budget as small as the state of Kansas’.

But the legislators, for the most part, have rolled up their sleeves and are looking at both proposals line by line. When I say “legislators,” of course, I mean the members of the two budget committees and the leadership of each house of the legislature. Individual legislators will pay attention to the budget for their pet projects, but few will pay attention to the overall budget until it actually comes to the floor of their respective house.

That’s actually true of the budget committees, too. They are broken up into small subcommittees of usually only three members, each of which will hear limited testimony and work the budgets for one department or set of agencies within a department. For example, one subcommittee last year oversaw the KPERS budget, another the Department of Administration, which includes the Governmental Ethics Commission, the Human Rights Commission, the Kansas Corporation Commission, and the Citizens Utility Ratepayer Board. Not all the subcommittees in the Senate have been set for this year, because there is a new Ways and Means chair, and he is reorganizing them. It will take almost to turnaround day for these subcommittees to finish their work, and then they will have to do it all over again on the opposite house’s budget.

In and around those considerations will be the considerations of many of the other bills in all the other committees. Here is where the power of the committee chairs is exercised. There are always too many bills to be taken up, and the committee chairs decide which ones will be worked. If no hearings are held on a bill, it will not be voted on in the committee. If it’s not voted on in the committee, it won’t be sent to the floor of its respective house.

The floor is where the leadership’s power is exercised. Not all the bills sent to the floor actually make it to a vote. The majority leader puts bills “below the line” or “above the line.” The line referred to is a line on each day’s General Orders, which is essentially the agenda of the Senate, or at least the part of it that refers to bills. Only the bills above the line will be considered that day. Some bills never make it above the line. The ones that do, of course, have to be voted on in the opposite house.

So the legislators are working, and working hard.

But inevitably, there will be tremendous amounts of work produced in the last week before turnaround day and the last week before the Senate adjourns. Things pile up, and the legislators can’t always get one another to take a firm stand until the deadline approaches. If a legislator doesn’t know what the outcome for his or her bill will be, he or she obviously will ask the leadership to hold that bill to allow more time for dickering with the other legislators.

And the more important the bill, the more dickering goes on. So, yes, the legislators may “wait until the last moment” to vote on important bills, but, no, the legislators won’t wait until the last minute to work on them.

And that’s enough of that for today.
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