Monday, February 15 – Long memories

There are some things you can’t find on Google.

But with a long memory and good staff, you can get what you want.

Republican legislators have been invited to discuss their proposed budget cuts at a joint meeting of the House and Senate fiscal committees.

“This is a first,” a budget staffer told the Sun in a front-page story today.

“Not true,” I said to myself.

I knew we had done this before because I was on the committee when it happened.

I spoke to a budget analyst who used to staff Appropriations. She found the 1997 letter from Chairman Rawlings inviting the House Republican Caucus to present its budget savings proposals.

I then shared it with the Sun reporter.

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It’s good to know somebody’s reading this diary.

I ran into an executive branch official at lunch. “What are you working on?” he asked.

“A bill that would restore money to the Cigarette Restitution Fund that’s been redirected to Medicaid to meet budget shortfalls,” I replied.

I was a lead sponsor of the bill creating that fund. It directs money received from the legal settlement with the tobacco companies to research and prevention programs related to cigarette smoking.

“That law passed ten years ago. It may be time to study how we allocate that money in the future,” the official said. “As you write in your diary, sometimes you can accomplish things without passing your bill.”

Thursday, January 21 – Googling the legislative process

The House floor session started late. That happens when a meeting in the Speaker’s Office lasts longer than expected.

I noticed that the Minority Leader and Minority Whip were not on the floor.

After the session began, the former rose to offer rules changes to make committee hearings and votes available on the Internet and to require that all committee voting sessions be open to the public.

(The whip confirmed my suspicion. The Republican leaders had a pre-session meeting on the rules with the Speaker that ran late.)

Paid lobbyists and activists are well aware of the actions we take in Annapolis. The average citizen can’t Google them.

So we should make changes to address the public perception that we make decisions behind closed doors and try to hide them from the public.

If you cast a vote, you should be able to defend it – in the press and back home.

A cautionary note: These reforms “will allow our state government to make the best possible decisions,” one of my Democratic colleagues has written.

Procedural changes won’t affect the fundamentals of the legislative process. Greater transparency is an admirable objective, but it won’t transform the House of Delegates into the world’s greatest deliberative body.