Sater: Reviewing the First Week of the Session

A belated Happy New Year to all of you. It is very cold here in Jefferson City and no telling how much money is being spent to heat this drafty old building. The Capitol building stays pretty warm. Must be all the hot air coming from the politicians.

Our legislative year has a bunch of new representatives (57) mainly because of term limits. We are limited to 4 terms of 2 years per term. I do miss the ones that termed out last year. They were great to work with. This is also my last 2 years in the House. As I have mentioned I have changed committee chairmanships. I did serve as an appropriations chair for the last 5 years, but this year I am the Health Care Policy chairman. A lobbyist came up to me in the hallway and said he hated me. He was kidding, but his problem was having to get to know another chairman after he had worked with me for the last 5 years.

Today, January 12th, we had our first Health Care Policy Committee meeting. It was a meet, greet, and ask questions meeting and for me to outline our function and the process. It also allowed all the new committee members to get acquainted and tell of their background and why they were interested in serving on this committee. It might be another week or two before any bills are assigned to committee.

After a legislator files a bill with the Chief Clerk’s office the bills are then sent to the Speaker's office, and his office decides which bill goes to which committee. I will be receiving a list of bills that I may consider. It will be my decision what bills are heard and what bills are placed in a deep dark drawer never to see the light of day. There will be some bills that I will let have a presentation, but there will be no executive session or vote to pass the bill out of committee. The sponsor of the bill will know this, but at least there was a public forum on the legislation.

The Speaker will give my committee a certain amount of bill slots. Slots are the number of bills that may leave committee after an affirmative vote and be placed on the calendar for the full House to debate and vote on. These are bills that have a fiscal note, a fee, a penalty provision, or did not pass unanimously. Bills that pass out of a committee with no fiscal note and pass without dissent are called “consent bills”, and there are no limits to how many consent bills that may pass out of committee. So, I am looking forward to policy decisions instead of number crunching, although I have been working with the budget chairman and his aids, talking about possible solutions to our budget woes.

This past week we passed out on the House floor two House Resolutions. HR 39 called upon Attorney General Koster to join the other 21+ state attorney generals around the nation in the federal lawsuit pending in the State of Florida which is challenging the federal healthcare law (commonly referred to as "Obamacare".)

The other legislation that passed is something we do every year at this time which is to revisit the House Rules [HR38] and make adjustments to them. One of the adjustments that I had been thinking about was smoking in the back chamber of the House which is a common area that representatives are only allowed in. All other state office buildings have no smoking rules. The House, in my opinion, was not setting a very good example by allowing smoking in a common area of the House. I brought this up in Caucus and asked for discussion. More and more people agreed, the Speaker decided to take a vote of hands, and it was an overwhelming “yes” to ban smoking in what is called the East Gallery. This just shows you can get results in a number of ways, but you have to remain flexible and take advantage of such opportunities.

Hopefully this article has given you a little insight into the legislative process. If you have any questions about this process, pending legislation, or a district problem that affect you please contact my office.