JFC Closed
See details here.
The JFC is meeting today and Rep. Dennis Williams asked the media to leave. Apparently, they are doing a “work to rule” deal today — since HB1 isn’t yet signed by Governor Markell, it isn’t a law they have to abide by. Technically correct, but one wonders how long it will take to even get this scheduled for signature. The sports betting bill got signed with great fanfare very quickly after passage, so how is it that this bill — one that has been around for awhile — gets the appearance of slow walking.
So what is going on here? Using procedures to delay the signing so that the GA doesn’t have to live with these rules until next session?
Tags: Open Government
There have been bills signed almost immediately many times before. This is definitely what you think it is. The administration will be able to spin it with technicalities, but it is what it appears to be.
This is feeling like they don’t want any of us to see the GA throw up their hands and do something lazy.
As shocked as I am to admit this, I find myself in complete agreement with Dave. This is exactly what it appears to be.
Let’s not forget the none to subtle telegraphing last week by the Governor’s office to the JFC, stating that they would be “reviewing” the bill. Don’t think they didn’t interpret that for exactly what it was – a temporary reprieve from scrutiny to get the hard stuff done.
If actions matched rhetoric, the Governor would be standing on the balcony outside his Leg Hall Office shouting for the bill to be delivered to his desk for signature.
The silence from that office is deafening on this one.
The Democrats are in charge, case closed.
Mike Protack
Ah, the ad-hominem explanation explains all once again.
(copied from the thread under El Som’s post “BIG NEWS! Bill Ending Discrimination Against Gays Likely to Pass Soon” in an attempt to get the threads back on-topic)
o-h: I do recall there was a GA session that did go into “special” session, but I have no idea as to when that was. Obviously, that is an option, but one that I am fairly certain that no one there wants to really consider, unless it’s 2AM, July 1.
FTR, I cetainly don’t make light of the task they have to deal with. It is huge and for this state, likely historic. That said, they received this committee assignment back in January. There should have been more substance, well…more that we could at least be aware of, except that HB1 apparently can’t walk up the stairs to the Gov’s office on its own and all the elevators are suddenly broken.
This makes me sick. Start calling the governor’s office and your GA members to make sure the bill gets signed right away and that members abide by it. It’s not just window dressing, it’s for real and we expect action.
No, ‘bulo doubts that this is Markell’s doing. But it definitely doesn’t smell right.
Here’s what happens. The governor cannot sign a bill until it is delivered to his office. The official bill has a ‘backer’, blue for House bills, gold for the Senate. The official bill with the backer is generally delivered to the Governor’s office by either the Chief Clerk of the House or the Secretary of the Senate, and it is logged in with the date and time of delivery.
Once it has been received by the Governor, he has a certain number of days to either sign it, veto it, or allow it to become law w/o his signature. The clock doesn’t start until he receives the bill.
There are times when it makes logistical sense to delay delivering bills to the Governor. One of those times is the last day of session. So many bills are jammed through the last day that the Governor’s legal staff simply wouldn’t be able to effectively review all of them in the allotted time, which ‘bulo thinks, but is not sure, is 15 business days.
This, however, is not one of those times. This bill has not reached the Governor’s office b/c someone has instructed the staff not to deliver it. Bernard Brady, who is the Secretary of the Senate, and Richard Puffer, the Chief Clerk of the House, are exceedingly good at their jobs, and their jobs are likely the two most challenging in the entire Hall. Simply put, they do not screw up.
El Somnambulo thinks, but he’s not sure, that Senate leadership is delaying sending the bill to the Governor. Although HB 1 is a house bill, it subsequently passed the Senate unamended. ‘Bulo believes that means that the bill does not have to be sent back to the House prior to delivering it to the Governor.
While it is possible that the Governor’s office has a ‘wink-wink’ relationship with the General Assembly on this, ‘bulo thinks that’s unlikely. He suspects that the Pro Tem is doing one last favor for Nancy Cook.
‘bulo, as I said:
HB1 apparently can’t walk up the stairs to the Gov’s office on its own and all the elevators are suddenly broken.
The bill was delivered to the Governor on June 3rd. It is in his hands and no longer in the GA.
There is a tenative bill signing for Friday, June 12. Don’t know where or what time.
I pretty much expected a delayed signing to allow these budget people one more round of privacy. I pretty much think the delay is at the hands of the legislature and not the governor. But, I’m guessing there’s a bit of give and take here on the part of the gov’s office to appease the Senate leadership and their queen bee Nancy Cook (all disgruntled Carneyites)
No comment here, except–Edvard Longstrep? ‘Bulo likes!
Let’s not lose sight of the fact that today was the first time a meeting of a legislative body took place to do the public’s business in secret while the Governor had sole power to change that.
How many more will take place before he acts?
If Markell has the bill, he should sign it – plain and simple.
If he hasn’t that’s on him – you can’t blame it on anyone else, regardless of how convenient that might be.
Put up, or shut up.
Until he has the bill, it’s the legislature’s bill. It’s that separation-of-powers thingy.
Sounds like he now has the bill.
Shouldn’t it be determinable by the “real” press as to who has the bill? How many news organizations have someone camped out in Leg Hall?
‘Bulo wondered the same thing as FSP. The press account was ambiguous at best:
“The Senate passed the open government legislation last week, but Gov. Jack Markell has yet to sign the bill. The governor’s spokesman Joe Rogalsky said last week the legislation had not yet been sent to the governor’s office by the Legislature, a procedural process that moves the bill from one branch to another.
Rogalsky said after the governor’s legal counsel reviewed the bill this week, Markell would sign it. A date for the bill signing has not been set.”
Reading that, it doesn’t appear that the press has asked the governor’s press secretary since last week.
If he’s got it, he hasn’t signed it.
If he hasn’t got it, he hasn’t asked for it – at least not publicly (and this is not a man that misses opportunities for free publicity).
But wait, it gets worse…
Anyone care to bet whether or not there were members of the Governor’s staff in the secret meeting this morning?
The OMB director would not be out of place in such a meeting, nor would people like the Chief of Staff, or Legislative Liaison.
Another nugget of information for the “real” press to look into.
Mark: Do you really think it serves the citizens of Delaware for the Governor’s budget people to boycott JFC deliberations b/c they haven’t received HB 1 yet?
As important a priority as getting HB 1 signed is to us, ‘bulo suspects that the Governor’s #1 priority is getting a budget he can sign out of this General Assembly. If that means that his staff sometimes has to dance to Nancy Cook’s tune, so be it. They’re just being practical, not engaging in some sinister cabal.
Seriously, there are times when 99 44/100% purity is enough.
Nancy Cook is not in control of whether the JFC hearings this week (at which, by the way, the lion’s share of the work to enact the FY 2010 budget will get done) are opened to the public; Jack Markell is.
He – and he alone – now has the power to decide if the JFC meetings that take place this week are opened to the public. And if he decides that they should be opened to the public there is nothing that Nancy Cook or anyone else can do about it.
He is also the only one that can ensure that the meetings that take place this week remain closed to the public, so that the JFC and his staff can decide how the tax increases and pay cuts that will affect thousands of Delaware families will get hammered out.
There is a difference between saying that you stand for something, and showing it. Jack Markell ran on a platform of changing the way that business gets done in Dover. (The line about “making a career about standing up to the status quo” still rings in my ears.) And yet, today another week began in Dover the same way that it has every year prior – nothing has changed.
I hope that I am wrong, but Governor Markell’s actions seem to be saying that he does not believe that the public is ready yet to see the sausage get made.
Perhaps next year, when the purse strings are not so tight and the decisions are not so hard, it will be more convenient to stand up to the status quo.
Well, you’ve got the single most serious state fiscal crisis in at least the last 30-plus years, maybe longer.
And you don’t know whether Markell controls the situation b/c you don’t know if he’s even gotten the bill yet. His lawyers DO have to look at it, if for no other reason than to make sure that the amendments to the bill were engrossed properly.
And you just have to be practical. Like it or not, the key to a budget still goes through Nancy Cook. The Beast Who Slumbers wishes it were not so. But it’s so.
So, for now, you have to play the game by her rules. The rules will change soon enough. Although, come to think of it, when talking about Nancy Cook, the rules CAN’T change soon enough…
The point ‘bulo is trying to make, admittedly poorly, is that he believes that Jack Markell is both a reformer and a progressive. However, he is coming smack up against the realities of the Delaware Way. He can’t blow ’em out of the water right away, so he has to make some compromises that he, and especially DL readers, don’t particularly like.
That’s just ‘bulo’s opinion, and it’s worth no more nor less than anybody else’s.
You can really see how much kool-aid these Markell guys have swallowed. First it was Ruth Ann, now its Nancy Cook… what would you do if you didn’t have these women to kick around down there boys?
Somehow, a guy elected to statewide office for nearly a decade, an office that wrote the checks and who sat on DEFAC…
For some reason, came into office and had no clue how revenue streams worked or that each check he was auto-penning cost $50 in administrative fees. He’s an “outsider”, against the Delaware way. [Greg Patterson, anyone?] Buhloney.
Apparently, the only thing he was outside was the office, because he obviously has no idea what’s going on. You can only plead ignorance for so long before it starts to look like incompetence.
Here’s the guy with a chief of staff AND “chief strategy officer”, both making buku bucks off your taxpayer money…. and they can’t get a bill to the right office for a signature?
‘bulo is a good soldier but the beast makes a lot of assumptions that he HAS to know, can’t ALL be correct.
Oh Hai wrote: “First it was Ruth Ann, now its Nancy Cook… what would you do if you didn’t have these women to kick around down there boys?”
That’s the kind of intellectually dishonest statement that cannot go unchallenged. Unless you’re willing to cite chapter and verse the praise that ‘bulo has heaped on Karen Peterson, Terry Schooley, Liane Sorenson, Dori Connor, deserved praise, he might add, and many others, don’t try to suggest that sexism has anything to do with his criticism of female officeholders.
A. It is not as if ‘bulo hasn’t found plenty to criticize w/male officeholders, just read virtually anything he’s written.
B. It is indeed possible to find fault with Cook, KWS and, yes, your beloved Bethany Hall-Long w/o sex having anything to do with it.
And C. Until you brought it up, ‘bulo had never thought in those terms.
Finally, Oh Hai is perhaps the first person ever to call El Somnambulo a ‘good soldier’. Even when he was working as a good soldier, he was never considered a good soldier.
I’m not trying to attack Jack Markell, or question anyone’s motives who supports him.
To be clear, on this issue I support him very much (to the extent that he truly wants to open up the closed door on Dover).
I don’t care who he hires, or how much he pays them, although I do wish he would list these people on his public website with contact information.
But you can’t be a reformer and a progressive by simply saying you are these things. Being a reformer (particularity in Dover) means that you have to ruffle feathers, and step on toes. Its never easy to do these things, but being a true reformer is not easy (that’s why there are so few).
This bill presents Mr. Markell with a unique opportunity to prove that he truly is the things both you and he say he is.
Its offensive to the principles that he espoused during his campaign that he has the power to open up the most closed of meetings in Dover, and appears unwilling to do so because it is inconvenient.
I’m not asking Governor Markell to do anything different than what he said he was going to do when he was asking for votes.
Reformers reform; politicians posture. Which one will Jack Markell be this week?
“Being a reformer (particularity in Dover) means that you have to ruffle feathers, and step on toes. Its never easy to do these things, but being a true reformer is not easy (that’s why there are so few).”
Being a reformer is a hell of a lot of fun and is vastly underrated.
Mark, ‘bulo respects your position.
It’s just that, having seen the way state government has functioned for over 25 years, he understands how much more difficult it is for Jack to, on one hand, push through a reform agenda while, on the other hand, trying to be a cat herder of 62 headstrong felines. Especially when those 62 felines have to solve a dire budget crisis.
That’s why ‘bulo’s gonna give him some time before he comes down too hard on Markell.
El Somnambulo, you do your reputation a disservice by thinking Mark cares about purity. He was an anti-Markell sock puppet for years and remains so. He just hates Jack under a different name than Delawonk now. Don’t believe
he’ll do anything other than trash Jack Markell for the next few years.
“He was an anti-Markell sock puppet for years and remains so. He just hates Jack under a different name than Delawonk now. Don’t believe he’ll do anything other than trash Jack Markell for the next few years.”
He was, and he is, and he may very well continue to be.
But he’s not wrong.
And the simple fact is that serious s**t went down today in JFC and the public was on the other side of the door. It did not have to be so.
George J.:
Since this is a thread about transparency, it makes sense that we all know to whom we are speaking.
My identity is public, and anyone that wants to learn more about me (perhaps more than they want to learn) need only follow the link to my blog and get their ogle on.
You, on the other hand, my brave fellow are anonymous – perhaps thats why you say such brave things.
Who are you? State your full name and provide a link to where one might learn more about you.
Otherwise, take it on the arches.
And if you’d like to have a debate about which of us has actually done more to promote open government, then lets unzip and we shall draw out our rulers my good man.
Never thought I’d say this twice in one thread, but put up or shut up.
“But you can’t be a reformer and a progressive by simply saying you are these things”
I think he’s already lived down the progressive part of this sentence already 🙂
“Governor Markell’s actions seem to be saying that he does not believe that the public is ready yet to see the sausage get made”
Whether that’s true or not, I’m not sure the public will like what they see when they get to see the sausage made. 🙂