RALEIGH — When it’s 11:30 on a Wednesday night and the N.C. House of Representatives is debating the proper way to protect people from Islamic law, it’s reasonable to ask, “Is there a better way to do this?”
I don’t mean better than democracy. I mean maybe legislative days shouldn’t start at 8:30 a.m. and extend late into the night to meet arbitrary deadlines.
It leads to missed details and opens the door for unscrupulous bill insertions to go unnoticed until after passage.
Sure, there are usually multiple reviews and votes before a bill can pass. And the governor reviews most bills before signing them into law.
But a bill can change, by a word or completely, at every step of the legislative process. Legislators often complain that in the crush of deadlines they don’t have time to absorb those changes.
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On Wednesday, before turning to the issue of
Islamic law, or Shariah, House members amended a corporations bill five times in seven minutes. It didn’t pass. At least one member said he couldn’t be sure what the bill would do.
On Thursday, the House ground to a halt temporarily after staffers realized members had approved a bill that hadn’t passed committee.
“We were not, in effect, voting last night on what we thought we were,” state Rep. Jeff Collins, R-Nash, announced.
That was “crossover day,” when most bills are expected to pass the House or Senate or die. Crossover weeks mean late nights as legislators sort through thousands of bills filed for the hundreds they will pass.
As the pace increases, so does an interesting phenomenon: Legislators accidentally voting against bills they favor or for bills they don’t.
It’s so common that Speaker of the House Thom Tillis instituted a rule this year to limit how often House members can change their votes after a bill has passed.
Crossover deadlines are meant to winnow things, to ease the crush at session’s end. But those sessions often go past midnight anyway. Democrats have complained that under Republican rule, important votes have been taken in the deep of night.
Under Democratic Party rule, Republicans complained that important votes were taken in the deep of night.
I recall a 2010 session where Democrats waited until after 2 a.m. on the last day to overhaul state ethics regulations and widen the criminal DNA database to include those arrested, not just convicted.
This is in no way solely a North Carolina issue. Georgia, where I worked for many years, restricts its annual legislative session to 40 days. In the hours before midnight on the 40th day, legislative leaders speed-read bills aloud as the House and Senate churn through a game of beat the clock.
On the last day of their 2008 legislative session, Georgia lawmakers “accidentally” eliminated a state rule requiring labels on campaign mailers to identify who paid for them.
That same year, North Carolina legislators made lobbying violations secret “by mistake,” according to a News & Observer report.
Former Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue got a retroactive $100,000 tax break for himself in 2005 — due to changes slipped into a tax bill. To this day, the public can’t be sure who did the slipping because legislators managed it with the high-level back and forth that makes up much of the lawmaking process.
In 2009, N.C. Sen. Tony Rand, a Democrat who is now retired, “inserted language in a legislative housekeeping bill that effectively gutted” legislation that would have saved the state millions on hospital treatment for inmates, according to the News & Observer.
So these things happen.
But is there a better way to limit such problems?
I turned to state Rep. John Blust. He probably talks more about the legislative process than any other member of the General Assembly — except for a few Democrats who have discovered a disdain for processes under Republicans control.
Blust, R-Guilford, said he favors a new rule to limit what the conference committees — appointed by legislative leaders to negotiate final bills when the House and Senate don’t agree — can put into those bills. That would cut down on “slip-ins.”
Blust also said he would give each bill a deadline. Instead of all bills having to pass by a given date, individual bills would have 50 days or so to pass from the time they’re filed.
“That way, they don’t pile up,” he said.
Brenda Erickson, a senior research analyst for the National Conference of State Legislatures, said she has never heard of a state using this system. She questioned its usefulness and said it would be hard to track all those deadlines.
“I don’t think there is anything that is ever going to fix (the deadline push),” Erickson said. “It’s human nature to procrastinate.”
As I finished this column later than hoped on a Friday afternoon, I cannot argue her point.
But if there is any will to change the legislative process in North Carolina, Blust said the time is approaching.
The Republican wave that won the GOP control of both chambers in recent years has brought massive turnover. Of 170 legislators in the House and Senate, 95 of them are in their first or second term, according to the N.C. Center for Public Policy Research.
They’re still learning the way things work in Raleigh, Blust said, and not all of them like what they see.
Contact Travis Fain at 373-4476, and follow@travisfain on Twitter.
