Will the Constitution Convention Bill Get the BIR Vote?

While I have a couple of bills on the calendar this week I am not going to try and fool anyone into thinking anything other than THE DEBATE in Montgomery this week will be the Constitution Convention legislation sponsored by Rep. Demetrius Newton of Birmingham.

Although a lot of us keep up with the inner workings of Montgomery I realize that some of the readers of this blog do not so let me briefly explain what the BIR is. A while back legislators try to come up with a way to have the budgets passed earlier in the legislative process. As a way of doing this they created a rule known as the Budget Isolation Resolution. This “resolution” is required to be passed before any bill can be voted on that is brought up BEFORE the budgets have been sent over to the Governor for his signature. So before every bill is brought up for debate on its merits a BIR vote is brought to the floor on that particular bill. The BIR must be adopted by three-fifths of all those voting in order to be adopted. If it is adopted then the bill can be debated and then voted on. If the BIR vote fails to get three-fifths approval then you move on to the next bill on the calendar.

Usually the BIR is adopted pretty easily so it serves very little of its original purpose to bring the budgets up for a vote earlier. However sometimes this rule is used very effectively by the minority to prevent a vote on a bill. (It happened last week to a bill sponsored by Rep. Newton as well— it failed on the BIR as well).

So the question remains, will the Constitution Convention bill get the BIR vote? My prediction is that it is very close but will come up short on the BIR. I have nothing firm to base this on other than my gut feeling. Usually there is a steady stream of calls and lobbying to prevent a bill like this from coming up for a vote and I do not hear that this time so either the opponents feel they already have the votes or they plan on using the Senate mess to kill the bill in committee in the upper chamber.

I might eat some crow on this prediction and if I did it surely would not be the first time! I just thought it might be fun to put it out there for a little more debate before we go into session tomorrow.