Strange Bedfellows in the Senate

Politics and strange bedfellows…

Among the many proposals to get the Senate unjammed, here’s one interesting story. At least it is to me…

An unlikely Senate coalition came to life last week and quickly died.

The Senate has been hogtied in a filibuster over the bingo bills for Greene and Macon County. A proposed coalition would have had Democratic Senators Myron Penn, Quinton Ross, and Bobby Singleton along with the Senate minority coalition (Republicans and dissident Dems) move those bills forward and end the filibuster. In return, GOP Senators Scott Beason and Ben Brooks would get considerations to move bills important to them, namely on immigration and insurance reform respectively. Republicans would have some language in the bingo bills about holding back expansion of gambling and could ostensibly say they were “containing gambling.”

It’s not difficult to see why this coalition “blew up,” in the words of one Montgomery insider.

The short-lived coalition was driven more by pragmatism than ideology and faced considerable obstacles. For example…

• ALFA – ALFA is one of the strongest political groups in the state, especially on the Republican side. It does not want immigration reform or insurance reform, two raisons d’etre for the coalition. One insider believed that ALFA would prefer the entire session is killed so that there is a special session for budgets – the idea being that there would be less chance of something going against ALFA in a special session focused on budgets.
• AEA – Paul Hubbert and Gov. Riley have worked on an education budget that includes large cuts to higher ed. AEA would not want any re-shuffling of the deck that could give a strong hand to anyone proposing to put money back into higher education at the expense of K-12.
• Governor Riley – Riley also does not want to unravel the progress made to this point (such as it is) on the education budget.
• Senate Democrats – Senate Democrats would not be eager to see a new majority diminish the role of the Rules Committee in setting the agenda. Since the new coalition would be motivated by pragmatism and not ideology, a real consideration would be the ire that the three Democratic Senators would draw from their Democratic colleagues.
• Gambling considerations – Many Republicans particularly want to insulate themselves from the gambling issue and want to be certain they cannot be viewed as promoting gambling.
• Senate Rule 9 – The coalition would have enough votes (18) to prevent the Senate from adopting the special order calendar from the Rules Committee, but without other votes it would not have enough (21) to substitute another special order calendar. Without a special order calendar, the regular order is used, and that is not typically a particularly productive means of getting to a bill that’s important to you.

A Senator here or there peels off, and the whole idea doesn’t hold together. But for one brief shining moment last week… you had the possibility of two most unusual sets of bedfellows – one in the coalition and one aligned against it.