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Morgan Griffith |
RICHMOND--According to Del. Ken Plum, D-Fairfax, 30 percent of the bills introduced during last year's legislative session died without any record of their disposition.
That's due to a change in procedure last year, whereby House committee chairmen were discouraged from hearing bills that were voted down in a subcommittee.
The idea was to encourage efficiency--if a bill wasn't likely to get much support, a subcommittee could handle it and the full committee didn't have to waste its time.
But those subcommittee votes are not recorded, even though it might be the only vote bills that fail ever get. So there's no record of who voted for or against the bills.
That's not acceptable, Plum said yesterday on the House floor, announcing that he's introducing a resolution to require that the subcommittee votes be recorded.
"We have reduced our accountability to our voters with this rule," Plum said. "It's time for a change in the rules that restores our accountability to voters of Virginia who have sent us here to conduct their business."
House Republicans, who pushed for the change last year, were quick to note at the time that committee chairmen could already choose to not hear a bill, and that the "change" was really just a clarification.
But in practice, many more bills died in subcommittees, where a half-dozen lawmakers or less voted them down. Plum said 30 percent of last year's bills died that way, as opposed to just nine bills from 2005 that had no record of what happened to them.
As the rules stand now, any member of a committee who wants to have a bill heard by the full committee can ask the chairman to hear the bill, even if a subcommittee voted against it. But that rarely seems to happen.
That was the thrust of House Majority Leader Del. Morgan Griffith's rebuttal to Plum.
"Any member of the full committee can call the bill up in the full committee," Griffith said, adding that those who don't like the subcommittee process should "develop the spine to say a few words in committee."
The Senate, in general, does not have subcommittees, except for committees like the Senate Finance committee. As one delegate pointed out, however, Senate committees more often let bills die by not acting on them.
To reach CHELYEN DAVIS:
Email: cdavis@freelancestar.com
