Tuesday, February 20th, 2007...7:41 am
Farnsworth to Deadbeat Dads: Please Move Here; We Want Your Buisiness
Bills are dying over in the State House. Always sad when a bill dies, ain’t it?
An interesting trio of bills died for a lack of votes in Third Read yesterday, HB 2096, a bill dealing with the sale of stolen vehicles, HB 2090, a change in election law, and HB 2249, which strengthens child support enforcement. HB 2096 and HB 2249 recieved a majority of members present, but a bill needs 31 votes to pass. There were five members not present, so this became difficult for any bill without overwhelming support.
A strange argument was made during the debate on HB 2249. The bill allows for the suspension of a professional license if a parent is six months behind on child support payments, and also had provisions for suspension of driver’s and recreational licenses as well. Eddie Farnsworth claimed that such a bill would be bad for the busisness climate since fewer businesses would move to Arizona if their employees could be gone after in this manner. Eh?
So, we want more “deadbeat dads” to move to Arizona? This is the sort of “buisiness” we would like to attract? Also, if this is so bad for buisiness, why did no representative of the buisiness community show up to testify against the bill before it got unanimous support at two committee hearings?
HB 2249 managed to get 30 votes, one short of passage. After all three of these votes failed, Majortity Leader Tom Boone rose to move for reconsideration of HB 2096 and HB 2090, but not HB 2249. Such motions are pro-forma on close votes, so why not on a bill that died by one vote? We cynical observers would point out that HB 2249 was the only one of these three that had near unanimous support from the Democratic caucus (except for Albert Tom), and we may be seeing more of this game where bills supported by Democrats get blocked or voted down because they are supported by Democrats rather on any of their merits. If this bill were to be reconsidered, one of the five absent members (Mark Anderson, who already voted for it in committee, Jonathan Paton and Lena Saradnik were absent but were likely yeses) would surely provide the needed 31st vote.
A bill to prevent the sale of hot cars has a higher priority than one to go after parents who refuse to live up to their responsibilities. That’s the “pro-family” agenda for you.
NB - I don’t know what is up with Albert Tom not voting for this bill. I’m also trying to figure out why Nancy Barto and Judy Burges loved this bill when it was in front of the Human Services committee, but voted against it when it hit the floor. Barto, since she sits on the rules committee, actually voted “yes” on this twice already.
6 Comments
February 20th, 2007 at 8:49 am
FYI, the bills died in 3rd read, not COW. The primary reason that HB2249 was not reconsidered was because none of the supporters changed their vote to a “nay” before the board was closed. In order to make a motion to reconsider a 3rd read of a bill, the person who makes the motion must vote “on the prevailing side,” or against the bill. During the closing moments of the votes on HB2096 and HB2090, Boone (and 1 or 2 other GOPs, I believe) swapped their votes to oppose the legislation for the express purpose of making the motion to vote again on Thursday.
February 20th, 2007 at 9:07 am
Point taken, I’ll fix the post to reflect that it happened in third read.
February 20th, 2007 at 3:23 pm
The bill in question was reconsidered today and passed 31-26.
February 20th, 2007 at 3:34 pm
Albert Tom only voted against the bill so that it could be reconsidered. Today he voted yes, as did Jennifer Burns, who didn’t vote yesterday.
February 20th, 2007 at 11:36 pm
Here’s my reasoning for changing my vote on the floor, since you obviously didn’t follow Rep. Farnsworth’s. The bill was onerous upon business to the point of the ridiculous since it not only will require business to report their employees’ information to DES (which they already do), but extends to any of their contractors’ employees who agree to a service contract of over $5,000 within a 12 month period. This obligation is truly onerous and not the responsibility of a business owner who may be left holding the bag.
My only regret in opposing the bill on the floor is not having dug deeper in committee where we may have been able to improve the bill and saved business owners from yet another unfunded mandate that may, ultimately, drive them from doing business in Arizona altogether. Fortunately, the bill had other parts to it that will improve deadbeat dad collections, so I am not losing too much sleep over its passage. Next time I will dig deeper sooner. Thanks for the chance to explain my vote!
February 21st, 2007 at 12:04 am
It still doesn’t make sense that this is why Albert Tom voted against it yesterday. If he had voted for it yesterday, it would have made 31, unless he had inside information that if he voted for it then someone else would have switched and voted against it.
Rep. Barto,
Thank you for taking the time to explain your vote. It seems to me, however, that what it would mean for businesses would be that they would have to take a little more care during the hiring or contracting process to avoid these folks. We already have similar situations with, for example, drug abusers and child molesters in which businesses simply go to the length of an additional background check to make sure they don’t hire any. They don’t go broke conducting the check on them, so they probably wouldn’t go broke verifying that the prospective employee is current on his or her child support payments.
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