The Knot Unwinds

After a couple of weeks in the legislature where the House has been tied up in procedural knots and the Senate has been working smoothly it looks like things are about to get back to normal. Or at least as normal is for the legislature. The House is typically the chamber of order where the Speaker keeps things flowing on a steady pace of legislative bills moving through the system. It is jokingly called the Speaker’s “flow chart” because the process typically moves just like you would expect to see a flow chart of orderly lawmaking should look. Well with the Black Caucus upset with the failure of the gorcery tax and the House Republicans upset that the Senate has refused to bring up any House Republican bills we have been in the legislative twilight zone in the House. Nothing has hardly moved for two straight weeks now. The Senate is now working better than anyone has seen it work in quite some time and last week started to add some House Republican bills to their calendar. With good faith move by the Senate it now appears that it is up to the House GOP to step up to the plate. If the Senate does continue down its path this week and bring up House bills for debate then the House GOP will need to allow the legislative process to begin flowing again. The purpose of the objections from House Republicans was that under the system that was previously in place no House Republican bill would be considered at all in the Senate so there was no chance a Republican could have their legislation passed. This in turn created a distrust between the two bodies. I believe this going to change for the better with the legislation being considered by the Senate. The filibuster by the Black Caucus will likely continue, somewhat, but I believe the knots that have tied us for a couple of weeks are slowly loosening and should finally see productivity in the House again– I hope.