General Assembly Post-Game Wrap-Up/Pre-Game Show: Thurs., April 18, 2019

Wednesday was a Tale Of Two Bills:

SS1/SB 37(Brown) expands the ability to have one’s criminal history expunged.  It’s a great piece of criminal justice reform legislation, and it passed unanimously.

HB 63(Lynn),  which had narrowly passed the House a couple of weeks back, passed the Senate 13-8, but only after a significant amendment was added to the bill.  It appears that the amendment would make it much more difficult to proceed against someone alleged to have carelessly stored firearms. Here’s what the amendment does:

This Amendment removes the burden placed on a person to prove an affirmative defense and instead requires the State to prove all of the following apply: (1) A firearm was not stored in a locked box or container. (2) A firearm was not disabled with a tamper-resistant trigger lock which was properly engaged so as to render the firearm inoperable by a person other than the owner or other lawfully-authorized user. (3) A firearm was not stored in a location which a reasonable person would have believed to be secure from access by an unauthorized person. (4) An unauthorized person did not obtain the firearm as the result of an unlawful entry by any person.

The bill was apparently weakened to the point that even gun rights supporters like Senators Delcollo and Paradee voted yes.  I don’t know the backstory on this amendment, I only know that there must be one. Maybe there was a third holdout? That would have assured the defeat of the bill. Hey, anybody with inside information, feel free to share.

Here is yesterday’s Session Activity Report. 

Today’s Senate Agenda is lowlighted by SB 61(Hansen), which:

…establishes the Transportation Infrastructure Investment Fund to provide economic assistance for renovation, construction, or any other type of improvements to roads and related transportation infrastructure in order to attract new businesses to Delaware, or for the expansion of existing Delaware businesses, when such an economic development opportunity would create a significant number of direct, permanent, quality, full-time jobs. 

More giveaways to businesses to go along with the FOIA-exempt doling out of state dollars to businesses that was established just a couple of years ago.  Not only is there zero, zero, empirical evidence to demonstrate the advantages to states of these giveaways, but an exhaustive analysis in the NYTimes demonstrates that these are, at best, zero-sum games. A game that we continue to play with public money. This bill sucks. It will, of course, pass.

Another good bill from Sen. Darius Brown. SB 32  ‘prohibits the practice known as patient brokering, which is the practice where patient brokers are paid a fee to place insured people in treatment centers so that the treatment centers receive thousands of dollars in insurance claim payments for each patient. Increasingly, patient brokers fraudulently enroll patients in low-deductible health plans with out-of-network treatment benefits.’

Can someone please place an amendment with SB 76(McDowell), which is being rushed through the Senate at an unseemly pace. Introduced on Tuesday, out of committee on Wednesday, on the agenda on Thursday. The bill makes changes to how state pensions are administered. The amendment I want to see?  One that removes this provision:

…gives sole authority to the Board of Pension Trustees to hire an external audit firm; clarifies that the Board chair must be appointed by the Governor with the consent of the Senate; clarifies that all records of the Board’s Audit Department are not public records under the State’s FOIA laws.  

Exemptions from FOIA are becoming as plentiful as Enactment Clauses. Unless there is a truly legitimate public policy reason to exempt something from FOIA, it should not be exempted.

The Senate also has a Consent Agenda scheduled for consideration. For you newbies, a consent agenda is generally a list of bills considered so non-controversial that a single roll call is sufficient to pass all of them.  At the request of any member, a bill must be removed from the Consent Agenda, and there is no debating that motion. It’s unusual to see such an agenda this early in session. You generally don’t see one until the last week of session.

I see very little of interest on today’s House Agenda, but YMMV.

The General Assembly is off for the next two weeks.  What ever will I write about? Time to start the 2020 version of ‘Mo’ Better Democrats’, perhaps? Your suggestions welcome.