By MARTIN HAWVER
Sometimes it is the little amendments offered up by a House or Senate member that don’t get adopted that have you thinking, well, why not?
Both the House and Senate have rules committees that, if asked, consider whether an amendment proposed by a member really relates to the subject of a bill being debated. It’s called being “germane” to the topic of the bill which is being debated.
We guess the idea is that most of those amendments offered during debate have been considered and rejected by the committees which pass the bills to the House or Senate for debate and rejected by those committees. Or…maybe they just weren’t thought-up until the bill is ready for full debate. Or…maybe it is to bring to the full House or Senate an idea that leaders in each chamber would prefer go nowhere.
Last week, those rules committees grew pretty powerful.
In the House, the rules committee said that an amendment to expand Medicaid to thousands of Kansans didn’t really relate to the insurance bill being debated. That bill dealt with health insurance and health care, but not specifically Medicaid. So, the amendment was ruled not germane, and the House adopted its committee’s ruling. Medicaid wasn’t debated or added to the insurance bill. It’ll be tried again but didn’t work last week.
And by not letting those amendments to go a full vote, legislators don’t have to leave footprints on issues raised, just the procedure. Might look better on a campaign flyer to have voted to sustain the decision of a rules committee than to have voted against…say…Medicaid expansion.
In the Senate, there were a couple amendments that sounded pretty good when their authors explained them…before they were ruled not germane and discarded.
One of them that sounded pretty logical, and heart-warming, didn’t get added into a bill that related to a simple change of terminology referring to forced prostitution. It simply changed the term from “sexual relation” to “sex act.”
Pretty simple, and women and young girls forced into prostitution really don’t have a relationship with those who abuse them…just performing a sex act.
The amendment by Sen. David Haley, D-Kansas City, proposed to add to that pretty logical bill to make sure that women, often victims of forcible sex trafficking, do not wind up with their names on court records.
It’s called “vacation,” that erasing the name of the victims so that it doesn’t follow them for the rest of their lives and damage their chances of getting regular jobs and living the lives everyone wants.
Sounded like a good idea, a reasonable way to protect those abused women.
Or…would have been if it hadn’t been ruled not germane to the base bill.
Might be another way to get that “vacation” into law, but an apparently simple one was rejected last week.
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Yes, this legislative procedure can be tricky, and the rules are pretty solid so that nobody sneaks into a bill something that isn’t good public policy. You need clear rules so that legislators aren’t tricked into passing a bill that does things they don’t want. That probably over the years has prevented some bad laws from being innocently passed.
But every now and again you see something relatively little, with no major effect on the operation of state government, or on most Kansans, get derailed by those rules.
. . .
Practically, we’ll see whether some of those amendments get on bills in the opposite chamber during committee hearings in the House on Senate-passed and in the Senate on House-passed bills where there’s a chance to have full committee hearings on those amendments.
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Syndicated by Hawver News Company LLC of Topeka; Martin Hawver is publisher of Hawver's Capitol Report—to learn more about this nonpartisan statewide political news service, visit the website at www.hawvernews.com.