2022 General Assembly: Unfinished Business

I’m not referencing either SB 1 (McBride) or SB 149 (Lockman), as their legislative journeys have just begun.  I’m writing about bills that could, and, in some instances, should have been enacted by now.

HCR 3 (Lynn): The Kop Kabal killed this resolution creating a task force to ‘investigate and make findings and recommendations regarding the treatment of inmates and the quality of healthcare provided to inmates in this State’s correctional institutions’.  Buried it in the Kabal’s own House Administration Committee.  Prisoners kept dying.

HB 75 (Bentz):  The final leg of a constitutional amendment that would eliminate from the Delaware Constitution the limitations as to when an individual may vote by absentee ballot.  Not a single House Rethug, including those who voted for the first leg, have agreed to support it.

SS1/SB 101 (Townsend):  The bill creates a right to counsel for renters, particularly those in low-income areas.  Passed 13-7 in the Senate with Spiros Mantzavinos the only D to vote against it.  Please ask him why.  Stephanie Bolden opposed it, and the bill didn’t clear the Housing & Community Affairs Committee that she chairs.  Speaker Pete could reassign it to a new committee, he could change the composition of the committee (simply adding another D to the committee would be enough to get the bill released), but there apparently are moneyed forces in addition to Buccini/Pollin who are putting the squeeze on legislators and cutting campaign checks.  Time for the grassroots to rise up.

SS1/SB 3(Lockman):  Read this article to get the context of what happened here.  This bill, and SB 6 below, were part of a four-bill package that both Democratic caucuses had agreed to run.  The two House bills sailed through both Houses.  But House leadership gummed up the works on the two Senate bills.  On SS1/SB 3,

The bill passed the Senate on April 1. The bill cleared the House Judiciary Committee on May 11. Pistol Pete reassigned the bill to the House Appropriations Committee on May 17, ostensibly to ensure that funding for the bill’s implementation would be included in the money bills.  The funds, in fact, were included to cover the costs of the bill’s mandate.

However, the bill sits in the Appropriations Committee to this day.  Good Ol’ Lumpy Carson kept the bill bottled up, never even scheduled a committee meeting.  He would ONLY have done it at the urging of Pissant Pete.

SB 6 (Sokola): This bill ‘creates the Delaware Large Capacity Magazine Prohibition Act of 2021’.  This bill was essentially gutted by the House with Kim Williams and her automatic weapon strafing it full of loopholes:

SB 6 passed the Senate on April 1, cleared the House Judiciary Committee on April 27 and…languished in the House until June 23.  On that date, an amendment that cut the guts out of the bill  was added on to the bill, and the bill then passed the House by a 24-16 vote.  Two of the sponsors of the weakening amendment, Bennett and Bush, still voted no on the bill.  Kim Williams said that the amendment was needed b/c she could have been considered a criminal under the initial bill.  In other words, her weapon of mass destruction was covered in the bill, therefore the definition of that WMD had to changed.  Uh, isn’t that a conflict-of-interest?  What the House did violated the spirit of the deal that had been cut.  Leadership could have stopped this.  Instead, Popgun Pete, along with fellow ex-cops Mitchell and Cooke, were co-sponsors of the amendment.

The bill passed the House, and now the Senate leadership has to decide how to proceed.

HB 244 (Lynn):  I’ll include this one b/c Jason mentioned it today, and it’s a very important bill.  The bill outlaws the practice of keeping people in jail b/c they can’t afford to pay ‘a fine, fee, cost, or assessment on children…’, and much more.  The bill’s cost projects to be around $2.4 mill annually which, based on the state’s budgetary outlook, is eminently affordable.  Speaker Pete, though, has dumped the bill into Lumpy Carson’s Appropriations Committee, meaning the bill won’t likely even be considered until after the Joint Finance Committee has completed the FY ’23 Budget.  Time to activate the grassroots.

I suppose I could include marijuana legalization here, but that’s not happening until the Kop Kabal is kicked out of power. Time to activate the grass-roots.

Back tomorrow with the First Pre-Game Show of the legislative season.