If legislating is like making sausage, Georgia’s Republican legislators earlier this week served up some mystery meat.
At around 11 a.m. Wednesday, the Georgia state Senate Public Safety Committee sat down to a quiet agenda of road-related questions, like when to pull over for a funeral procession or the optimum fine for speeding in a school zone. The day’s business was supposed to focus on minor adjustments to bills that had already been approved by the other chamber. In other words, the standard procedures a second chamber takes for a bill en route to becoming law.
Yet a determined group of lawmakers decided to use the forum as a test kitchen and introduced a controversial new bill about immigration. In less than 20 minutes, the committee had passed the draft legislation to allow anyone in Georgia to sue any city or state that they feel is offering “sanctuary” to undocumented migrants.
Feb. 28 was Crossover Day, a sort of expiration date almost three-fourths of the way through the annual 40-day legislative session. If either the House or Senate hasn’t approved a bill by then, it generally can’t become law that year. The rule is meant to prevent the late appearance and rushed passage of novel legislation.
Yet the day’s events and the opaque nature of how this bill was birthed illustrates how powerful lawmakers can commandeer legislation, gut its contents, and stuff it with new intent.
Every year, some junior legislators find their bills filleted by more powerful colleagues in this way. Last year’s top chef sliced up a bill honoring a Lyons soap box derby and refashioned it to legalize sports betting.
Inside the Senate committee room Wednesday, the committee chairman, state Sen. John Albers, R-Roswell, apologized to his colleagues and the audience for keeping them in the dark about the draft law he said he and others had been working on “non-stop.” At least one of the committee members was in the dark about what Albers was championing. There was no copy online. Albers apologized for not sending a copy to them much in advance.
His colleague, state Sen. Randy Robertson, R-Cataula, had a copy of the legislation – entitled “Senate Public Safety Committee substitute to House Bill 301” – and enough familiarity with it to make the formal bill presentation to the committee.
Albers and Robertson then presided over a semblance of a hearing.
The bill language fits with the strident rhetoric that leading Georgia Republicans have carried on in the name of 22-year-old Laken Riley, an Athens nursing student who police say was murdered by an undocumented immigrant from Venezuela.
Earlier in the legislative calendar, the House had passed 97-74 a bill that would require every eligible police and sheriff’s department to help identify undocumented immigrants and detain them for possible deportation. That measure was expected to be taken up by the Senate and likely passed, especially as GOP leaders have made immigration a wedge issue in the presidential campaign.
The Albers bill, however, was something different.
As the committee meeting progressed it became clear that Albers was taking advantage of an unusual legislative maneuver. He was proposing to cut out the language of House Bill 301, which originally focused on school zone speeding, and refill it with a seven-page proposal for a citizen-initiated process for suing cities and counties. The proposal also would provide a way to withhold state funds from those governments and suspend their elected officials.
Lobbyists who focus on local government funding issues, as well as advocates for immigrants’ rights each signed up to comment on the bill, but none of them could get a copy of the proposed wording before their turn to speak.
By a 4-1 vote, the committee agreed to the changes.
There still was no public record of the language. People in the hearing room were only able to take photos of the bill after the committee adjourned.
Later Wednesday, Lt. Gov. Burt Jones sent a press release praising the bill that linked to the document, for at least a few hours.
As of Thursday morning, however, that link was broken
By end of business Thursday evening, the Georgia legislature’s website still had no link to the bill. For more than 24 hours, the public had no way to read the ingredients that some of their representatives had chosen to swallow.
Indeed, when it comes to bill substitutions, only the chef and his assistants know for sure what’s in the pot, and they decide who gets access to the recipe. Bill substitutions are not published for the public online before a hearing. The publication comes afterward, usually after the close of business on the day a committee approves the bill.
But the length of the delay on HB 301 is unusual. It didn’t show up online until sometime in the hours when Thursday night turned to Friday morning.
The state Senate Rules committee may schedule it for floor debate as early as March 11.
The Tide brings news and observations from The Current’s staff.
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