Delaware General Assembly Pre-Game Show: Tuesday, June 15, 2021

Let’s start with some good news, sorta.  SB 15, the minimum wage increase legislation, is on Thursday’s House Agenda.  However, it’s a long Agenda, SB 15 is at the bottom of the Agenda, and it’s questionable whether it will be considered on Thursday.  Several amendments, all by Rethugs, have been placed with the bill.  Pay attention as to whether any D’s cross the aisle to help pass any of the amendments.  They should all be considered hostile amendments, and a unified caucus should defeat them.  If House leadership wants to keep everybody in line, they will. If not…you know what they’re trying to do here, and on whose behalf (Carney) they’re trying to do it.  This is a defining issue, as in D’s support it and Rethugs oppose it.  Pass the bill as is.  I don’t ascribe anything insidious as to its placement on the Agenda.  Virtually all the bills above it are House bills that would still have to go through the Senate committee process, if passed.  The only other Senate bill ahead of it on the House Agenda is SB 6 (Sokola), which would ban large capacity magazine weapons, also a definitive bill for D’s.  BTW, lest you wonder whether elections matter, SB 6 never would have gotten out of the Senate if Dave McBride and Nicole Poore were still in leadership.

The House holds committee meetings on Tuesday and Wednesday this week, no legislative session until Thursday. Here are Tuesday’s House Committee highlights:

*Neither HB 49 (Collins) nor HB 109 (D. Short) are getting out of the House Administration Committee. Nor should they.  Both, oddly, have something to do with Gov. John Carney.  HB 49 seeks to limit a Governor’s power in issuing Executive Orders during an emergency not unlike COVID (because ‘freedom’), while HB 109 seeks to make Carney’s budget-smoothing fetish part of the Delaware Constitution. Neither has a D sponsor within sniffing distance of it. Nor should it.  This whole budget-smoothing thing, when you stop to think of it, reflects the sheer banality of the Carney Years.  Of all the things to obsess over.

*HB 119 (Dorsey Walker) establishes Juneteenth as a State Holiday, and eliminates the ‘floating state holiday’ for Columbus Day. Administration.

*HJR 4 (Schwartzkopf) creates the illusion of establishing some sort of police accountability.  Check this out: It “directs the Criminal Justice Council to establish and by November 2, 2021, publish integrity reports on the number of complaints made against police officers in each police agency in this State for the past 3 years, and at least once a year thereafter, and to create and publish a list of all decertified police officers in this State in the previous 10 years, which shall be updated upon notification of the decertification of any police officer.”

What it doesn’t do, of course, is list the number or kind of complaints by officer, only by agency.  Not to mention, a list of decertified police officers, by definition, is merely a list of those who are no longer police officers. What good does that do? A fucking joke from the Cop Cabal.  Schwartzkopf must go. Administration.

HB 241 (Heffernan) ‘permits an officer to refer a juvenile who is in possession of alcohol or marijuana to the Juvenile Civil Citation Program rather than issue an assessment for a monetary civil penalty. Pursuant to the Juvenile Civil Citation Program, a juvenile may be referred to counseling, treatment, or other appropriate interventions. The bill also removes a provision requiring monetary marijuana penalties to double if unpaid within 90 days.’  I would change the word ‘permits’ to ‘requires’, but that’s just me. Judiciary.

HB 243 (Cooke) ‘prohibits law-enforcement agencies from releasing or publishing or causing to be released or published the name of any juvenile or any image depicting a juvenile, including displaying such image on any publicly maintained social media page or website, unless the juvenile is charged with a violent felony, and release or publication of the photograph is necessary to protect the public’s safety.’ Judiciary.

HB 244 (Lynn).  A real good bill from one of Delaware’s best legislators, HB 244:

(1) Prohibits a court from imposing a fine, fee, cost, or assessment on children without the means to pay them. (2) Provides the courts with the discretion to waive, modify, or suspend any fine, fee, cost, or assessment. (3) Prohibits a court or the Department of Transportation from suspending a driver’s license for nonpayment of a fine, fee cost, assessment, or restitution and from charging a penalty, assessment, or fee to a defendant for the cancellation of a warrant issued due to the defendant’s nonpayment of a fine, fee, cost, assessment, or restitution. (4) Prohibits a court from imposing an additional fee on a defendant for payments that are made at designated periodic intervals or late, or when probation is ordered to supervise a defendant’s payment.

There are only two Senate Committee meetings scheduled for today.  The entire Senate Education Committee agenda is comprised of bills that have already passed the House.  One bill in particular–HS1/HB 92 (Baumbach), garnered only a slim majority.  The bill ‘reduces the term of a member elected to a school board from 5 years to 4 years for members elected after December 31, 2021. House Substitute No. 1 for House Bill No. 92 differs from House Bill No. 92 because it clarifies that under § 1052(c) of Title 14, 2 members of a school board may be elected in the same year when the terms of both members expire the same year.’ I don’t know what the controversy was here, but when legislators like Reps. Heffernan and Matthews, both strong public education advocates, vote no, I suspect that the Senate will review this bill closely.

The Senate has quite the Agenda today.

SB 156 (Walsh) requires the University Of Delaware to pay prevailing wages ‘to laborers and mechanics working on all University of Delaware construction sites or renovation projects that exceed a certain cost.’  Good. I look for a straight 14-7 party line vote on this.

HB 125 (Longhurst) ‘establishes the crimes of possession of an unfinished firearm frame or receiver with no serial number, possession of and manufacturing a covert or undetectable firearm, possession of and manufacturing an untraceable firearm, and manufacturing or distributing a firearm using a three-dimensional printer. This bill also makes it a crime to possess a firearm frame or receiver with a removed, obliterated, or altered serial number.’  Three D’s voted against this bill in the House: Bennett, Bush, and Carson.  I look for only one to vote against it in the Senate.  I’m calling it 13-8.

SB 144 (Pinkney) ‘modernizes the hate crime statute and consolidates related offenses together with the hate crime statute in the Criminal Code.’ This appears to have been written by the AG’s office.

While both HB 124 (Griffith) and HB 91 (Bentz) appear likely to pass easily, they are both good bills that deserve recognition.  HB 124 prohibits a person who is the subject of a Protection from Abuse Order of the Family Court and who knows or has reason to know, that the Order has been issued from purchasing, owning, possessing, or controlling a deadly weapon or ammunition for a firearm in this State.  HB 91 puts some real teeth into Delaware’s Consumer Fraud Act.

Looks like a productive start to a productive week. Let’s keep it going tomorrow.