Week 13 - March 27th to March 30th

Done with Guns - for now

Last week we moved S.55 out of the House and sent it to the Senate. On Friday the Senate narrowly agreed to the House bill. It's now on its way to the Governor, who is expected to sign it. Here's a quick description of all the amendments we considered. Many of them were to improve the portion regarding large capacity magazines.

The last two weeks of this bill
Friday of the week before (3/23/2018), the bill came to the House floor for second reading. That was the session that ran until 9:30 at night. I wrote about that on my website. Over the weekend several members put together amendments primarily to make the restrictions on high capacity magazines more reasonable. Those amendments came up for votes on Tuesday of this week (3/27/2018), another long session. If you want the details, the official House calendar contains some of the amendments, and the official House journal has the others. Tuesday evening at about 8:20 the House passed S.55 as amended for third and final reading and sent it over to the Senate to consider. Friday (3/30/2018) the Senate approved the House changes. That sent it to the Governor. Here's a VTDigger article about it.

Weekly Summary

• Tuesday - 
• 10:00 Lots of orange vests and hats in the gallery and the Senate seats. I had a packed

  

  Printed Amendments to S.55

  House for my devotional that started the session. I'll write that up in another post. The House calendar showed us starting with S.55, but over the weekend the order of events changed. Leadership decided that it would be better to have the Capital Adjustment bill first and the gun legislation second. The previous week we did the opposite; that Friday we had guns first and ended with the Budget Bill. Everyone was exhausted and didn't really want to think about the budget. So Tuesday the order was reversed and my committee (Corrections &Institutions) reported out the adjustments to the Capital Bill. This was both good and bad for all the people dressed in orange and eager to get started debating gun regulations. Some had been there at 8:30 in the morning! So that was bad. But it was good that they saw a bit more of how the House operates and where the State's bonded money goes. 
• 10:15 - In committee. Right after the devotional the pledge of allegiance (which we do every Tuesday) our committee left the floor to meet. One of the amendments to S.55 had to do with School Safety. It had been decided to make that an amendment to the Capital Bill instead, because we had a section about School Safety. So we had to consider it and vote on it prior to presenting the Capital Bill which was scheduled to be first up on the day's agenda. This was real hurried work and not the way I like to do things. Close to 11:00  the committee voted unanimously to support the amendment  and we returned to the floor to begin reporting the Capital Bill. I reported out the Clean Water section of the bill. That entails speaking to the assembled House, going through a spreadsheet explaining how we allocated the money. It went fairly well.
• 11:27 - After reporting the capital bill we took up the amendment, which was approved, and then the bill itself. It was approved for second reading with only one vote opposed.
• 12:00 - Break for lunch
• 1:00 - Party caucuses before taking up S.55. In the caucus Leadership went over the amendments that would be presented on the floor.
• 1:30 - We left caucus to find that the Judiciary committee was meeting to consider various amendments. We knew it would be a long day.
• 2:30 - We finally started floor work on S.55.
• 2:30 - 8:20 Over the course of these six hours we debated and voted the dozen or so amendments listed at the beginning of this post. There was also a half-hour or so break for food and exercise and there were several recesses while the Judiciary Committee considered amendments. There was plenty of listening to speeches and explanations of votes. But it was all civil enough and a fine demonstration of the legislative process.
• Wednesday
• 8:45 -  Noon -  In committee on Medication Assisted Treatment (MAT) for opioid addiction in Corrections facilities. Though everyone was a little tired from the day before, we switched gears and started work on three bills (H.166, H.867 & H.773) that are in our committee and deal with this issue. This gets complicated fast and I confess to being uncomfortable making what may be medical decisions when I am not a doctor and not real familiar with the treatment of addiction. We are trying to coordinate with the Human Services committee on this but they are busy with other bills. We had several people in to testify about the issue including people from DOC and the Dept of Health.  Prisoner advocates also testified.
• Noon - break for lunch
• 1:00 on the floor 
• 1:30 roll-call vote on the third reading of H.932 which is our Capital Bill adjustment. It passed unanimously. Our bill received some attention during the previous day's gun-regulation debate as there is $4 million in the bill for a school safety program. Much of the gun debate hinged on school safety.
• 1:50 - Back in Committee for more testimony on MAT.
• 4:45 - Done for the day
• Thursday
• 8:00 for IT Advisory Committee meeting
• 9:00 In committee for more testimony on MAT - This was a particularly frustrating day with a lot of talk and little progress.
• 12:00 break for lunch
• 1:00 On the Floor - I spent much of the afternoon going back and forth to a Senate committee taking up the bill I reported to House over a week ago (H.874). Because I reported it out of our committee it's my responsibility to see what happens to it. Meanwhile, on the floor of the House they were debating the Toxic Substance bill (S.103) primarily arguing about who should make the decision as to what chemicals are on the list of toxic substances and therefor subject to the regulations. In the end here was a roll-call vote and we agreed with the Senate version of the bill 96 to 42. I voted "Yes."
• 4:30 - adjourn
• Friday (Good Friday)
• 9:00 In Committee for discussion of MAT
• 9:30 On the floor - S.221 establishing an Extreme Risk Protection Order that sets up a judicial process for confiscating guns from a person who poses an extreme risk and preventing that person from purchasing guns. This passed easily on a voice vote.
• 10:08 In Committee for a little more testimony on MAT
• 11:30 Done for the week

Next week

We're hoping things will settle down a bit but there's talk of ending the session during the first week in May and that doesn't leave a lot time to deal with some big decision my committee needs to make.