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April 11, 2023
Two weeks ago, the Democrat-led House, Senate, and Governor agreed on budget targets for each committee that increase the state?s budget by nearly 40 percent for a new base total of $72 billion. This week and in the coming weeks those budget bills will be heard on the House Floor starting with Higher Education HF2073 and Legacy Finance HF1999 on Wednesday. On Thursday the elections bill HF3 is up (which you can read more about below), and more budget bills are scheduled for next week.
These hundred-page omnibus bills increase government spending to unsustainable levels and contain policy that the Democrats don?t want to pass as stand-alone bills such as gun control measures. I will be voting no.
You can watch the floor sessions on the House?s YouTube page here.
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Today the Democrats scheduled one of their omnibus elections bills to be heard on the floor on Thursday. This bill includes automatic voter registration, modifies the absentee ballot laws, creates a new crime of broadly defined voter intimidation, and more.
This bill was first heard in the Elections Committee in February and has been amended many times since leaving that committee. These are not insignificant changes. The bill has been drastically changed and, in my opinion, must go back to the Elections Committee for a more thorough vetting. It also was passed by six fiscal committees without the fiscal note being available which is an irresponsible way to legislate. Because of this, I made a motion in the Rules Committee today to amend the Calendar for the Day by removing HF3, but my motion did not prevail. Watch today?s committee hearing here.?
A fiscal note is an official non-partisan document that shows how much a given bill would cost the taxpayers. This particular fiscal note, once we finally received it, was 36 pages of important details that the committees needed to hear. The fiscal note listed the following agencies and departments as being impacted: Secretary of State, Attorney General, Campaign Finance Board, Corrections Dept, Governors Office, Human Services Dept, Public Defense Board, Public Safety Dept, Sentencing Guidelines Comm, and the Supreme Court.
It is disappointing that a bill with such heavy implications on our state?s election law and agencies/departments is going to be passed off of the House Floor without a thorough vetting, both by not getting a fiscal note until the seventh committee stop and not returning to the elections committee after being heavily amended. I will be voting no.
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