House Resolutions: Better never than late
For cryin. out. loud.
Today's the last day the House can consider bills that have been sent back to them with Senate amendments. They can either sign off on them, or they can send them back to the Senate to fix, or they can send them to conference committee and hope they can come up with a compromise sometime tomorrow afternoon.
So what did they just spend their first 90 minutes on? Resolutions.
Of course, granted, a lot of them over the past coupla days have been thanking and congratulating and honorning STAFFERS and the HRO and all those thankless-job-doers who get overworked and completely forgotten by the general public most of the time (shout-out, ya'll) - so by all means, they deserve to be honored.
Now. Here's how NOT to honor the staffers: File a whopping 255 resolutions on Thursday evening, the day before a major deadline, three days before we adjourn Sine Die.
This happened yesterday, according to sources who know these kinds of things. Rep. Ryan Guillen, upon 6 p.m. adjournment, laid a stack of 255 resolutions on House staffers' desk to file last night.
And just when, in the midst of the last three days, is this House going to find a way to pass these things? And just why was it necessary to do all this *now*?
Would someone please buy this man a calendar? The whole flap over his local bill that lead to the House overruling the speaker came, in part, after reps realized he had filed it in APRIL, waaaaay after the bill filing deadline, and were then able to prove that it had been filed as a local bill.
One of the reasons he fought so hard for that bill was that it was one of his district's most favored bills - he even tried to plead with his colleagues NOT to overrule the speaker's decision to keep it on the regular calendar, breaking with his marching orders and losing that vote pretty harshly.
Because everyone knows that in order to please your district, make sure you file their pet projects AS LATE IN THE SESSION AS YOU POSSIBLY CAN.
Here's a point the vice chair might have gotten confused: Lawmakers wait until the bitter end to pass the most important bills. They're not waiting until the bitter end to file them.
Big difference.