In General Assembly, a Surprise Call to Farm Out Controversial Bills

How sausage is made.

What does proposed state legislation about guns, child abuse, women’s health and gaming have in common?

Besides touching on some of society’s hot-button issues, all of these bills are scheduled for examination and debate before the Illinois General Assembly’s House Agriculture and Conservation Committee.

Surprised?

The BGA was taken aback upon learning that along with bills about deer and turkey baiting, the Agriculture Committee will also weigh in on legislation pertaining to:

• concealed possession of hand guns,
• waiting periods for firearm purchases,
• changes to the criminal code for minors when handguns are involved,
• rules requiring women to have ultrasounds before having an abortion,
• required reporting of child abuse, and
• gaming.

It’s unusual when bills on such controversial issues are funneled to one totally unrelated committee—especially to have seven of them at once take that pathway.

Indeed, one of the first major steps toward vetting a bill is to hold a hearing in the appropriate or related committee. The purpose of that committee process is to ensure that bills that reach the House floor for a vote are sound both in form and policy.

Typically, a bill gets sent to committee based on its subject matter; for example, bills involving trains get sent to the Mass Transit committee, and bills involving banks get sent to the Financial Institutions committee.

Sometimes, a bill topic may not appear to be directly related to the committee, but there is a nexus that links the topic to the committee. For instance, a bill that concerns the environment may actually be about regulating toxins found in baby bottles. Such a bill would be rightly placed in either the Environment or the Public Health Committees.

From there, the process unfolds.

Lawmakers are assigned to different committees based on their interest and expertise in the subject matter. That enables legislators, who have been following issues for years, to weigh in and help to refine legislation, hopefully for better.

Just as important, the committee process allows citizens to have their voices heard. Any member of the public can attend a hearing and voice support for or against a bill, but it’s easier to get such feedback when legislation comes before a related committee.

Throughout the process, supporters and opponents of the legislation work with lawmakers on the committee to, in theory, make sure the bill is good public policy before making its way to the House floor for a vote.

That’s how it’s supposed to work.

But when bills are placed in committees that have nothing to do with their subject matter, the entire legislative process risks being subverted.

Pam Sutherland, head of policy for Planned Parenthood of Illinois pointed out  that placing a bill about women’s health into the Agriculture Committee is “like sending a hog-farming bill to the Public Health committee.”

House members were chosen to sit on the Agriculture Committee because of their expertise and interest in agriculture. They do not have the subject matter expertise that allows them to make informed decisions on legislation unrelated to that topic.

House Speaker Michael Madigan knows how to play the game and is aware that bills with little chance of passing in the correct committee can sail through another committee simply because lawmakers don’t know or care to ask the right questions.

Could that be why Madigan sent these non-agriculture bills to the Agriculture Committee?

When we called Brendan Phelps, a Democrat from downstate Harrisburg to ask why his gun and women’s health bills ended up in the Agriculture committee, he said “these issues are ‘wear-your-heart-on-your-sleeve’ issues. You want to put it to a committee where it’s going to get [voted] out so you can get it to the floor.”

Steve Brown, spokesman for Speaker Madigan, says this is a practice that has gone on for decades. “If a sponsor of a bill expresses a committee preference,” he said, “then the response is to send it there.”

When asked about his proposed women’s health bill, Phelps indicated that he had not asked for the bill to end up in Agriculture, but it was likely the bill’s supporters had spoken with the Speaker’s office about getting it into a committee where it would pass.

Phelps noted that pro-gun bills have gone to the Agriculture committee for years because it’s stacked with ‘downstaters’ who tend to be more pro gun. He cited the bills placements in the Agriculture committee as a plus, noting that if it went to the committee where the other gun bills go, it would never get to the floor.

That may be true. But that speaks more to problems with the committee process than the merit of arbitrarily placing bills in committees where they have the best chance of passing.

This appears to be a blatant attempt to push bills through the committee process without the appropriate level of public scrutiny.

While this is a completely legal tactic, and does not violate House Rules, it’s not a good government approach to passing laws.

Taxpayers rely on lawmakers to make good public policy decisions.

Effective public policy comes from a robust and informed dialogue on the issues. That type of dialogue on gaming, for example, won’t likely occur in the Agriculture Committee.

Bills completely unrelated to the subject matter of the committee to which they have been assigned should be sent to the appropriate committee, and future committee assignments should be made with subject matter in mind.

The following list of bills were sent to the Agriculture and Conservation Committee:

HB0148 FIREARMS-CONCEALED CARRY
HB1403 CONCEALED CARRY-PERMITS
HB1514 CRIM CD-FIREARMS WAITING
HB1919 ULTRASOUND OPPORTUNITY ACT
HB2045 CRIM CD-MINOR-FIREARM-PREEMPTS
HB2093 DCFS-CHILD ABUSE-REQUIRED RPTS
HB2881 HORSERACING – ADVANCE WAGERING

Chicagoland Transit Agencies on Track for Gov’t-Approved Watchdog

Amid the confusion and chaos of this week’s legislative session in Springfield, the House and Senate passed a groundbreaking bill targeting the fraud, waste and corruption that plagues the Chicago area’s mass transit systems.

The bill’s supporters expect the Governor to approve the measure.

The Better Government Association has been working with Sen. Susan Garrett (D-Lake Forest), good-government advocates and the RTA to craft legislation that creates an independent inspector general for the transit agency that oversees the RTA, Metra, PACE and CTA.

The resulting bill, Senate Bill 3964, was co-sponsored by Sen. Garret and Rep. Jack Franks (D-Woodstock), and creates an independent inspector general to oversee the boards and employees at RTA, Metra, PACE, and CTA.

The inspector general will be housed in the Office of the Executive Inspector General, which already oversees the activities of the Governor’s office and its agencies.

Sen. Garrett has been working on the legislation with leaders at the transit agencies since last spring when news reports emerged detailing how Metra’s Executive Director Phil Pagano gave himself unapproved payouts on future vacation time. The unauthorized payout of $56,000 came on top of his salary of more than $250,000.

Ultimately, questions surrounding Pagano’s actions lead to his suspension. In May 2010, Pagano, 60, was found dead of an apparent suicide.

The BGA is committed to eliminating fraud, waste, and abuse of public resources. This legislation is an important step toward making the Chicago area’s mass transit systems more open and accountable.

The Trouble with TABORs

The Illinois Constitution requires that the Governor present a balanced budget to the General Assembly each year and that the legislature adopt a budget that’s also balanced.

That’s how it’s supposed to work.

Unfortunately, Illinois has defied that tradition by approving a series of budgets that were technically “balanced” but in reality paved the way toward racking up a record-setting $13 billion-plus deficit. Compounding this problem is the fact that the state has no solid fiscal blueprint for solving the current budget problem or for preventing another crisis from occurring.

This dilemma is sending some state lawmakers scurrying for another way to solve Illinois’ financial crisis.

The newest proposed fix (though it’s an idea that’s been batted around various states for years) is a Taxpayer Bill of Rights, or TABOR—a craftily worded title that does little to explain the actual contents of the policy. In Illinois, this is being presented as a constitutional amendment that, if passed by both the House and Senate, would appear on the ballot in 2012. If approved by the voters, the amendment would go into effect by 2014.

Essentially, TABORs restrict increases in state spending. Expert opinion varies on whether TABORs in general have any positive impact on the economic stability of a state. The Illinois version has drawn opposition from both traditionally more liberal groups like unions and more conservative groups like the Illinois Policy Institute.

Illinois’ Speaker of the House, Mike Madigan, who personally ushered the measure through committee in Springfield this week, says the measure will restrict state spending by tying any increases to the average annual percent change in per capita personal income, as reported by the US Department of Commerce. Any variation in that amount would have to be presented by the Governor for agreement to the Comptroller and the Treasurer, to be followed by “yes” vote of three-fifths of the General Assembly.

Basically, the idea is that rising and falling revenue from personal incomes taxes should match rising and falling levels of state spending. If the state doesn’t have the money coming in from taxes, it can’t spend the money.

Sounds a lot like the balanced budget our Illinois Constitution already requires, doesn’t it?

According to the Capitol Fax Blog, legislators have indicated their support for the measure because of their past inability to rein in spending.

Holding the line on unneeded spending is a fine idea. So fine, in fact, that it’s part of lawmakers’ constitutionally mandated job description.

Rather than coming up with new spending restrictions that wouldn’t even take effect until 2014, lawmakers would probably be serving the public more responsibly by focusing on ways to efficiently fund essential services while also cutting waste and excess.

Tough and politically unpopular choices have to be made. Our state constitution already requires it.

The Illinois Freedom of (Some) Information Act?

Photo courtesy Sid Webb/Flickr

How quickly we forget.

In the wake of scandal and corruption at the highest levels of government, Illinois lawmakers passed a law in 2009 bolstering the Freedom of Information Act—a move designed to give everyday people access to important government information.

This year, however, lawmakers are having second thoughts and are trying to whittle away at this newly arrived accountability era by making it more difficult for the public to root out mismanagement, waste and corruption.

There’s no more glaring example of legislative backsliding than HB 5154, a measure passed by both the House and Senate last spring that flies in the face of reformers’ efforts to make Illinois government more transparent and accountable to taxpayers.

If the measure passes, the public will no longer have access to government employee performance reviews. This proposed law prevents government watchdog groups like the Better Government Association and the ACLU, along with investigative news teams, from accessing vital records that indicate whether Illinois is demanding the highest level of performance from its public servants.

Access to information about how our government spends our money is vital to uncovering waste and misconduct. Arguments to conceal performance evaluations hinge on fears that making those evaluations public will discourage managers from giving honest evaluations, or that the evaluation process will be used as a method of public humiliation to retaliate against unwanted employees. But these reasons only highlight the dysfunction of our personnel system, and do not speak to the legitimacy of the peoples’ right to access information about their government.

If the government gets to pick and choose, taxpayers will never know what’s really going on behind the curtain. Exempting performance evaluations from the sunlight of transparency does not serve the public good.

Gov. Quinn had the chance to veto the bill entirely, putting the public’s right to know how its tax dollars are spent first, but he did not. Instead, he used a legislative maneuver that sends the bill, with an amendment, back to the General Assembly to be heard next week.

No amendment could make this bill work for the public good.

We urge lawmakers to vote no on HB 5154 as it makes its way back through the General Assembly during the upcoming veto session.