AKLEG Day 36: 'A Frankenstein's monster of a bill'
The House Republicans' plan to bullrush through a sweeping omnibus education bill fell flat on its face Monday.
Good morning, Alaska.
In this edition: The sweeping education bill proposed by House Republicans and backed by Gov. Mike Dunleavy is in limbo after the House failed to muster the 21 legislators needed for a procedural vote. Republicans were quick to cry that it’d be the end of any and all education issues this legislative session—that if you didn’t vote to advance their sweeping omnibus, you didn’t care about education—a hollow threat given that there’s a lot of time left in the session and it’s the Republicans who’ve been sitting on the bill in the first place.
Current mood: 🙄
‘You can complain about process all you want.’
After trying to bullrush a sweeping education bill loaded with conservative policies through the early days of the legislative session—a move that skirted scrutiny of both the policies and their costs—House Republicans tried to bring Senate Bill 140 to the House floor on Monday to begin what was expected to be a marathon of amendments. Before they could even get to that, however, the Majority fell flat on its face with a 20-20 vote to adopt the omnibus as the working version of the bill.
The House Majority’s 20 Republican members voted for advancing the omnibus, but every other member of the House—the 16 members of the Minority, the three non-Republicans in the Majority, and the caucus-less far-right Rep. David Eastman—voted against it. It’s a surprising yet predictable outcome for the narrowly divided House. Surprising, given it’s the sort of thing that you have figured out well in advance of bringing something like this to the floor. Predictable, given that it appears nothing has been done to win over anyone outside of the House’s 20 Republicans in the past month (likely because it would have come at the cost of Republican priorities).
Still, Republicans were quick to cry foul over the vote, threatening that this version of the bill is the only and last vehicle to institute any education policy changes this session. If the omnibus—which contains Republican priorities like a broad expansion of charter schools, home school funding and the governor’s controversial teacher bonus program—doesn’t advance, they argued, then nothing else from the underlying legislation like a critical internet grant program for remote schools or an increase to baseline education funding would.
“We have basically sent a message to the education community that we don’t care,” said House Rules Committee Chair Rep. Craig Johnson, the Anchorage Republican who devised the omnibus bill, of the vote while demanding that they revote. “The high-speed internet (grants) is key to many people in this room. The no vote on the CS is a no vote on internet for children in rural Alaska.”
That would be a reference to the underlying legislation that everything else was stapled onto. Senate Bill 140 was—and still is—about delivering a law change necessary to access federal grants for internet upgrades for remote schools. There is a looming deadline for that program, but there’s nothing stopping the Legislature from advancing that in a standalone bill… except for House Republicans like Johnson.
“You can complain about process all you want,” Johnson said. “The process is what it is, and it’s been done many times before.”
Other Republicans also cried crocodile tears about how much they deeply cared about education, overlooking the fact that they have spent much of the session attacking the public school system and its supporters. Rep. Tom McKay, an Anchorage Republican who has been opposed to a BSA increase, literally whined, “You are canceling me!”
But none of it was convincing.
The 20 no votes held strong, arguing that the deadlines were largely inflated, the policies hadn’t been vetted, the options weren’t as narrow and that the inaction was the fault of House Republicans who’ve been sitting on the bill for more than a month.
“This bill has been in the possession of the rules chairman for weeks. For weeks, we were told this bill would be on the floor, and for weeks, we have waited. I have spoken to this, and members of the body have spoken to this; where has the bill been?” said Minority Leader Rep. Calvin Schrage, I-Anchorage, during the debate. “Instead, we were given a false deadline, a Frankenstein’s monster of a bill. We’re told this is your opportunity; if you care about education, this is your only shot.”
He noted that the procedural vote on adopting the bill still left the older versions of the bill in play. There’s the House Finance Committee version that covers the internet upgrades and includes an increase to the base student allocation, and there’s the Senate version that is just the internet upgrades and some other minor funding pieces.
Rep. Bryce Edgmon, the Dillingham independent who voted against adopting the omnibus along with the two other non-Republican members of the Majority, said that didn’t know how he was going to vote on the measure but that after soul-searching and talking with his fellow rural members that he couldn’t support something with so many unanswered questions.
“I want a better process,” he said, noting that he had sat through the Rules Committee’s lone hearing on the bill. “It was not a full vetting of any of the measures. … That’s not good legislation; it’s not a good process. My district sent me down here to defend my small schools.”
Schrage said the House Majority’s demands boiled down to: “Accept our monster or screw education.”
Even Rep. Eastman argued that it was wiser to return to the previous versions of the bill, noting that the logrolling done by the House Majority violated the Legislature’s rules requiring bills to stay focused. He said it was a more transparent process. (Also, even if the House were to advance the bill on a 21-vote margin, it would still need to corral the two-thirds vote necessary for a title change to abide by that rule.)
When the threatening speeches didn’t seem to be getting anywhere, the House took an hour-long lunch break that extended to 5 p.m. when they returned only to gavel out for the night with plans to continue talking.
The House is set to resume its floor session at 11 a.m. today.
Stay tuned.
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