Rum, Romanism and Rebellion

It seems that the notion of a special session is falling apart. The strategy of allowing cuts to go through with the vague promise of a special session later to handle revenue (a tactic either inspired by J. Wellington Wimpy or Satipo from Raiders of the Lost Ark) didn’t work that well for la Cervecera.

Marszałek Senatu Bob Burns has no choice now but to seek out Democratic votes, especially since he has all but read out three members of his caucus. Democratic votes means a “clean” revenue bill: just the sales tax hike the Governor requested and nothing more. On the House side things are working out a bit differently. Tlotoani Kirk Adams is laboring under a notion that a bill must be passed only with votes from Republicans. So, what they are planning on delivering is a sales tax bill, but with a whole raft of other tax cuts designed to get his members excited enough to vote for the darned thing. This is all tentative right now, so I don’t know if the tax cuts are less than the revenue gained from the tax increase, but somehow I doubt it. Somewhere, someone forgot about our state’s deficit.

Adams has made it clear that he won’t let any “clean” bill from the Senate come to a vote in the House. In other words, he won’t allow his members to vote for anything capable of actually passing the Senate (let alone, something that might get Democratic votes!). This leaves Burns and company wondering what the whole point would be of bothering with a special session in the first place.

So, this leaves us with a question: the next regular session begins in a few weeks, and we still don’t have last year’s budget hole plugged. Are we going to be having another late night session in July to solve next year’s and this year’s budget problems?

Here’s the fun part:

Let’s suppose we go into a late night July 1st session next year. Heck, we don’t have to “suppose” it, we are already on track to do so. Our election laws have changed, so the primary date has been moved up to late August. Next year, it will be August 24th. So, late night July 1st session happens with no agreement, more wrangling and not-so-special sessions to fix what wasn’t done before for the next few weeks and everyone wondering what sort of clowns we elect to our state’s governing body, and boom…July 24th, early ballots for the primary hit people’s mailboxes.

I don’t know if this means that they will put on their anti-government Tea Party face in time for snarling voters on the right or if they will realize that they have to clean up their act for the voters and, you know, govern.