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Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Ind. Decisions - Following up on: "Apparently there are all sorts of surprises in the special session budget"; my plan

The ILB has posted a number of entries on this year's budget bill and its surprises: items added into the budget bill at the last minute by those intending to address particular issues.

I hesitate to call this practice "logrolling" -- here are some definitions from a paper I wrote in 2001:

Legislative logrolling involves combining together into one bill several unrelated proposals, in order to accumulate the requisite number of votes for the combined measure to pass. This practice may occur during the initial drafting of the bill, or at any point after introduction. A subset of logrolling involves the addition of an unrelated rider to an essential piece of legislation, such as a budget or appropriations bill, generally in the last days of a legislative session, so that it may “ride” to approval.
A Minnesota Law Review article in 1958 set out these distinctions:
The primary and universally recognized purpose of the one-subject rule is to prevent log-rolling in the enactment of laws — the practice of several minorities combining their several proposals as different provisions of a single bill and thus consolidating their votes so that a majority is obtained for the omnibus bill where perhaps no single proposal of each minority could have obtained majority approval separately.

Another stated purpose of the provision is to prevent “riders” from being attached to bills that are popular and so certain of adoption that the rider will secure adoption not on its own merits, but on the merits of the measure to which it is attached. This stratagem seems to be but a variation of log-rolling

Most of this year's "surprises" appear to have been inserted into the budget bill at the last minute of the final day, June 31st, making this less like a compromise "to accumulate the requisite number of votes for the combined measure to pass" (since many members were not aware of one or another insertion), and more like language secreted into the bill so that the new provisions would "ride to approval."

HEA 1001ss is, after all, 511 pages long, and no one saw it in the more-easily-managed HEA (enrolled act) form on the 31st, they were voting instead on a conference committee report that, as finally agreed upon by the four conferees, looked more like this.

I served as legal counsel to the state budget agency for a number of years in the 1970s and 80s and saw a lot of budget bills. Compared to today, budget bills back then were pretty straight-forward -- there was a general budget bill and a construction budget bill.

It is my theory that as the years have passed, each biennium's budget bill has topped the last in the move from "budget" bill to omnibus catch-all bill. This has accelerated in the 21st century. My plan is to look at a number of budget bills and trace their evolution over the years to illustrate that my theory is correct.

Then I hope to key in our Supreme Court's opinions to this time-line leading to where we are today ...

Posted by Marcia Oddi on September 22, 2009 06:03 PM
Posted to Indiana Decisions