Anatomy of a Franken-bill
Original House Bill 885: Would allow the use of medical marijuana to treat seizure disorders.
Franken-bill 885: Keeps medical marijuana language. Adds language of SB 397, which mandates insurance coverage for young children with autism.
Original Senate Bill 292: Would create a statewide Alzheimer's disease registry to gather data on the disease.
Franken-bill 292: Creates an Alzheimer's registry and (per HB 707) would bar any state or local government or agency from operating a health care exchange or navigator program allowed under the Affordable Care Act. It also would make it illegal for any public employee or agency to use state resources or time to advocate for the expansion of Medicaid.
The final days of the Georgia Legislature’s 2014 session are turning out to be less a case of “Schoolhouse Rock” and more a rumination on Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein.”
In a mix of strategy and desperation, lawmakers this year have taken an unusual number of different bills and sewn together pieces of them in hopes they survive to reach Gov. Nathan Deal’s desk. However, the stakes have been raised by the fact that caught up in the maneuvering, as the legislative calendar comes to a close, are issues affecting thousands, if not millions, of Georgians.
The House denuded an effort to privatize Georgia’s child welfare system? Fine, senators said, stripping a completely unrelated measure to glue the foster care bill onto it.
Senators made late changes to an anti-Obamacare bill? No problem, House members said last week, tacking it back onto an unrelated Senate bill that creates an Alzheimer’s registry.
The House refuses to take up a bill mandating insurance coverage for young children with autism? Big deal, senators said, adding the autism bill to one legalizing medical marijuana to treat seizure disorders.
Before the clock strikes midnight Thursday and lawmakers are forced to go home for the year, one or more of these “Franken-bills” likely will live on. Legislators just have to hope they aren’t greeted by townsfolk with torches and pitchforks.
Anna Bullard, whose daughter Ava is autistic, has fought for insurance coverage in Georgia for more than a year. She doesn’t find the gamesmanship amusing.
Senate Bill 397, the original autism insurance legislation, passed the Senate unanimously Feb. 25 but has gotten nowhere in the House. The Senate last week added the language from SB 397 to House Bill 885, the medical marijuana bill that overwhelmingly passed the House. Legislative procedure dictates that HB 885 now go back to the House, but it gets to skip the committee process and go straight to the floor for consideration.
“It’s on 885, and I think the hope was that the House really wanted to pass that, so they’d be willing to pass autism,” Bullard said.
The patchwork bills are part of a larger back-and-forth between the chambers that has tempers rising. The House last week added just one Senate bill to the floor debate calendar for Tuesday, the 39th day of the 40-day session. Typically, in the final days, dozens of bills are considered in each chamber.
The move by House members was a kind of protest over what representatives felt was a logjam of their bills in Senate committees. In response, the Senate tabled every House bill it had on its debate calendar for this past Thursday — although it eventually relented and called more than a dozen bills for a vote.
House Speaker David Ralston, R-Blue Ridge, accused the Senate of trying to be “cute.”
“We always kind of get to this point where we have some frustrations,” Ralston told colleagues. “They seem to have been a little different, maybe a little higher level over the past few days.”
Ralston said House bills “are being toyed with over on the other side.”
Senate leaders, no surprise, have a much different view.
“I think we’re being creative,” said Senate Health and Human Services Committee Chairwoman Renee Unterman, R-Buford, who has been at the center of many of the add-ons. “We have to deal with the hand we’ve been dealt: The session this year is so short.”
State officials decided to move Georgia’s primary elections this year to the earliest date in state history, May 20. The move prompted lawmakers to create a calendar keeping their visit to Atlanta short. In years past, the session has often extended well into April.
Exacerbating the issue is that it’s an election year for all lawmakers and they are eager to get home. State law prohibits them from fundraising during the session.
“We don’t have time to work these things out this year,” Unterman said. “That is exactly why you’re seeing all these attachments.”
Rep. Alan Powell, R-Hartwell, has been in the House since 1991 and has seen these kinds of flare-ups before. “I’ve seen this some years more than others, but it’s always that built-in stress that falls between the two bodies and individuals on different issues,” Powell said.
He added to the tumult last week by talking his colleagues into amending a minor measure, House Bill 60, which would have expanded state law to allow most judges, current and retired, to carry guns in Georgia. House members added to the bill much of this year’s major gun rights expansion legislation, House Bill 875, and then shipped it straight to the floor of the Senate.
“It’s the same game. I’ve seen this go on for years,” Powell said. Hopefully, he added, everyone will have gone home for the weekend, relieved their stress, and will show up this week ready to work.
“We’ll probably be there until midnight on Tuesday,” he said.
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