8 bills per day. That’s how many bills have to be killed or passed each day to get through the list of proposed bills in the 2008 session.
Utah’s legislative session lasts 45 days. Each day there is some dedicated floor time, that is, time spent in debate of bills, motions and resolutions. Between the House and the Senate this year there are 354 proposed bills. Some of these bills seem to be technical changes in government operations and strike me as largely noncontroversial (one bill for instance would require that counties have campaign financial disclosures available to the public within 24 hours of being filed - this sounds like no big deal, but I can envision counties opposing this bill on the argument that they don’t have the staff to comply with it). However, each bill has to be proposed on the floor, the sponsor allowed to speak in its favor, opposition allowed to speak against, a motion to vote on the bill, a vote, then the bill goes onto the second reading calendar, where the process goes again, then the reading calendar. If it passes all three votes, it goes to the other chamber where the process begins again. In other words, a bill has to be voted on 6 times before it goes to the Governor to be signed or vetoed.Â
The legislative calendar for the first week of the session is available here. Based on past experience, the schedule laid out for the first week will pretty much continue through the session. So Monday has about 4 and half hours of floor time (the first 90 minutes are opening ceremony but later in the session that’s floor time). Tuesday, Wed, Thursday and Friday each have about 2 hours of floor time. In one week, the works out to some twelve hours of time for debate on the floor.Â
Afternoons are dedicated to committee hearings. In case you’re curious, committee hearings are used to kill bills. A bill has to make it out of committee to make it to the floor and be voted on. A great many bills die in committee for a great many reasons. Often there are bills dealing with similar issues that be combined into a single bill - so one bill is killed and the text of the other is amended and the amended bill is then considered. There are other bills the leadership wants killed so they make sure the bills die in committee (these are bills that the leadership deems unlikely to pass or that they really don’t want to pass because they believe it would make Utah look bad). There is another category of bills that the majority opposes but don’t want to have to vote against, so they are killed in committee; I once attended a late night hearing on hate crimes legislation during which it became obvious that the majority was using the hearing to kill the bill. This tactic allows bills that often have popular support among voters to kept out of the legislative light of day. Legislators don’t have to go on record as voting against them and committee hearings allow legislators to go on record with technical sounding objections to bills which provide them a cover that sounds good in public; in the case of the hate crimes bill, committee members expressed concerns with expanding Utah’s law beyond the scope of existing federal laws. Committe hearings also rarely attract much media attention which means that unless a bill being heard has a great deal of media attention already, it can be killed quietly. Committee hearings can be extremely lengthy as members of the public, lobbyists, interest groups, and legislators are given time to speak.
Floor time is chaotic. Although it is governed by strict rules of debate, members come and go, there’s a great many technical things going on, there are distractions, diversions, procedural issues to be decided. After votes, there can be long delays where nothing seems to happen. It’s difficult to tell what is going on during these lulls - watching the floor you see members approaching the clerk, talking to leadership, talking to each other. But what’s actually happening is a mystery. Floor time isn’t dedicated solely to reasoned, high minded debate which means even if there’s 5 hours of scheduled floor time on a single day, not all five hours will actually be used to consider proposed laws.
As the session goes on, the level of chaos increases. Time for debate grows more and more precious. Every session, there are bills that simply fail because there is no time to vote on them. They may have passed one chamber then they go to the other and get through the reading calendar twice but there’s no time for the third reading. They fail because there’s no time to consider them.Â
I counted 354 proposed bills for the 2008 general session. That’s 8 bills per day between floor time and committees that have to be considered in some form or another. That’s not much time for legislators to consider the bills, understand them and make good decisions. Is this how we want our laws being made?
#1 by glenn - January 21st, 2008 at 06:20
Hey, since democracy here is really only a word, and most of those voting don’t even read the bills, let’s just call this the “bums’ rush” version of government. If this is democracy give me a benign king.
Final word…truly, what we want doesn’t matter and hasn’t for a long time.
#2 by caveat - January 21st, 2008 at 09:34
But I WANT a caretaker govt that will lie to me while they contrive a way to further consolidate all the money into the hands of a few. It’s the Uh merkin way damnit.
#3 by Richard Warnick - January 21st, 2008 at 12:02
All the talk about “technical” stuff is just to confuse people and make them think that legislation is rocket science. If our legislators were smart, they wouldn’t regularly approve unconstitutional bills.
#4 by Glenden Brown - January 21st, 2008 at 12:18
Richard - You’ve hit the nail on the head. Some legislation requires technical changes but those are really workflow issues for gov’t employees, or changes to the law concerning things like calendaring issues (for instance if something must be available within 24 hours, but the next day is a saturday, then it moves to the next business day which is a monday). Our legislators often operate on the principle that they can write a law in such a way as to create a court challenge that will expand or contract what is constitutional - hence the regular anti-choice laws that are designed to trigger lawsuits. The theory is at some point they’ll find the correct language to outlaw abortion that won’t actually violate constitutional rights to things like privacy.
#5 by Jeremy - January 21st, 2008 at 14:03
Glen,
Do you think we’d be better off having these jokers making laws year round instead of just 45 days per year?
I think we’re much better off with the flawed system you’ve talked about in this post than we would be if we were to create a year round sausage factory.
#6 by Glenden Brown - January 21st, 2008 at 14:53
Jeremy - I’ve argued before that I think a year round legislature is worth trying in Utah. The citizen legislator model we use creates so much pressure to pass a particular law in such a short amount of time, there’s so little time to really consider bills, and so many bills get lost in the regular session that more time seems to be worth examining.
There are some things that could be put into place - for instance limiting the times during which new bills could be introduced (maybe only during specific months or during the first week of each month) would allow legislators time to draft bills in a more thoughtful manner, working more effectively with the AG’s office or the governor’s office. A year round legislature would also reduce the inflence of the executive branch which I tend to see as a good thing in general. A year round legislature carries some additional costs, but the payback in terms of a better informed, more thoughtful, quite frankly more leisurely law making process seems worth it.