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EXERCISING MAJORITY RULE-THE DAILY PROGRESS, JANUARY 30, 2008

Posted: Thursday January 31, 2008

Exercising Majority Rule

January 30, 2008

First there was the rule to bury certain legislative decisions in subcommittees where they could be killed without accountability.

Next came the rule to ram other decisions into the open where accountability could be pinned on the opposition, even when no longer germane.

The two House of Delegates rules appear to be quite contradictory. The only common denominator: They can be used to benefit the majority, which in this case is the GOP.

We’ve already written plenty about the first rule.

Two years ago, the GOP majority in the House of Delegates used its new power to change the legislative rules under which the House operated. Bills that went to subcommittee for evaluation could be killed there – with no recorded vote.

And although the subcommittee meetings were open to the public, as a practical matter they were often held in unmiked rooms by lawmakers speaking in low voices, so anyone in attendance still couldn’t figure out what was going on.

This year the House majority adopted a rule allowing it to send legislation straight to the floor without the usual committee vote to forward it on.

They chose to apply this new rule to a Democratic delegate’s bill to allow collective bargaining by state and local government employees.

In fact, Del. Adam Ebbin, D-Alexandria, the bill’s sponsor, had already asked that it be withdrawn.

Therein lie the seeds for another House departure from usual procedure.

Generally, such requests are routinely granted. Not so in this case. Instead, the House Rules Committee exercised its new rule by sending the bill on to the floor to force a full vote.

Most Democrats refused to vote, on principle. The majority then applied an obscure parliamentary rule that allowed them to add 25 non-voting Democrats’ names to those of the voting Republicans. The result makes it appear as if the bill were more widely opposed, 82-0 instead of 57-0.

Why fast-track this bill against the sponsor’s wishes, while keeping other bills in the dark?

The answer clearly is that the majority party wanted to get Mr. Ebbin on record as having sponsored an unpopular collective bargaining bill. Allowing him to withdraw it would have defeated that cynical purpose.

Indeed, House Majority Leader H. Morgan Griffith acknowledged that the vote was in part a partisan payback. Democrats take campaign money from unions, then present themselves as friends to business.

“What they’re doing is talking out of both sides of their mouth on this issue and they proved it today because they weren’t willing to take a vote,” he said.

A further example of the cynical partisan twisting of the process: House Speaker William J. Howell signed a letter calling on business leaders to get involved in the debate, even though it appeared by then that there would be no debate – that, instead, the bill would be brought up to the floor in order to be voted down as ostentatiously as possible.

It was never really about the legislation, only about the political show that could be staged around the legislation.