House: the Death Watch
At 3:30 p.m., the House seers had our bill death march at 36 bills DOA by the HB deadline at midnight tonight.
Rep. Frank Corte's office is keeping score on the 23-page calendar, using an elaborate three-minute-per-bill system they came up with to figure out how many bills are dying while the House idles. When they're passing bills, the number holds.
But when they slow down, chub, and do other things that generally just wind down the clock (including figuring out what to do when the voting board went down - an actual machine malfunction, I was so excited!), a bill dies every three minutes.
They count from the last page.
I know you're shocked (shocked!) to hear that the final pages contain the controversial bills by Bill Zedler, Charlie Howard, and Wayne Christian. Their bills on banning work sites, transferring embryos, creating covenant marriage and getting police to verify the citizenship of people they pull over .... are bill slayers. As in, once one of them comes up, everything after them dies.
You bet that was done on purpose.
They've also figured out how to give them credit for bills when they're making good progress. Don't know how they do that, but I'm guessing its somewhere between Fuzzy Math and Quantum Physics.
By Corte's count, the police officer bill on p. 22 is LONG dead. Zedler's bill on work sites (p. 20) is watching its life pass before its eyes, as the death count has just stopped a few bills below his.
A chairman just told me that the House won't go past page 15, if they get that far.
It's 4:15 now. We're on page 9.