Get yer coffee and set yerselves down to watch a committee meeting or two this morning. They’re starting early. With two major bills being considered.
Paid Family & Medical Leave. 10 AM. The bill will clear committee since all D senators are sponsors or co-sponsors on the bill. The bill will not be run in the Senate on Thursday. Since it is a substitute bill, sponsors want to make sure that there are no technical corrections that need to be addressed, and they want to provide sufficient time for the senators and the public to look at the substitute. It’s a lengthy bill, so that’s a ‘fair play to you’ to the Senate sponsors.
Marijuana Legalization. 11 AM. Should be a marathon. However, based on the committee membership and the bill sponsorship, the bill is likely to clear House committee. All 9 D committee members are on the bill as sponsors or co-sponsors. Gonna try to watch this one, just to see if, and how many, police testify against the bill. Although, it’s possible they may (figuratively, one can only hope) hold their fire til a later date.
Here is yesterday’s Session (Relative In-)Activity Report.
We’re once again solely in Committee meeting mode today. Other Senate Committee highlights:
SB 205 (Gay): Expands the availability of free feminine hygiene products at all public and charter schools. Health & Social Services.
SB 208 (Walsh): Clarifies that an employer is liable to an employee for liquidated damages if the employer does not make wages available on the next payday after an employee quits, resigns, is discharged, suspended, or laid off.
Today’s other House Committee highlights:
HB 283 (K. Williams) disburses money from one of those law enforcement slush funds to provide $100K to the Human Trafficking Interagency Coordinating Council which, frankly has done a piss-poor job of enforcing some pretty darn strong human trafficking statutes. The money comes from something called the Fund to Combat Violent Crimes. That fund gets its money from, wait for it, $15 penalties ‘imposed on and collected from defendants for certain crimes or civil violations’. If that’s not a slush fund, I don’t know what is. Judiciary.
HS1/HB 264 (Griffith) ‘permits a person who has been the victim of non-consensual sexual conduct or non-consensual sexual penetration to apply for a sexual violence protective order if the person has a reasonable fear, based on specific conduct occurring contemporaneously or subsequent to the non-consensual sexual conduct or penetration, that the perpetrator of the sexual conduct will harm the petitioner in the future’. Judiciary.
HB 204 (K. Williams) ‘provides a means by which private schools and youth camps operated by private schools can obtain criminal background checks for potential employees and volunteers…’ and ‘also clarifies that the Department of Education is a child serving entity and its employees are obligated to undergo background checks’. Hmmm, something about the term ‘child serving’ seems a little…off. Why am I reminded of a certain Twilight Zone episode whose alien visitors merely want ‘to serve Man’? Education.
Back tomorrow with what I expect will be two relatively truncated Agendas.