Seasons’ Greetings Westfield! Hope you are all doing well and enjoying your holiday season so far.
In my opinion, one of the most important parts of my job is to keep people informed about what’s happening in the State House and what legislative issues we are taking up. In fact, that is the main reason I started to write this column in the first place. I believe strongly in government transparency and my responsibility to communicate with my constituents.
Every now and again, I have constituents come up inquiring about amendments or bills that we have passed and the process they go through. Since we just went through the process of amending the Criminal Justice Reform Act, I thought this week’s column would be a good opportunity to explain the process a little further.
Firstly, for those of you who might need a refresher, amendments are the process by which legislators can change a bill once it comes to the floor. Any legislator in the chamber can propose an amendment to the bill while it’s in their chamber. Essentially, they are sort of like legislative wish-lists. Any change to the bill that a legislator wants to propose is fair game (within reason). In this case, there were over 200 amendments to the recent Criminal Justice Reform Act. Every amendment proposed then gets voted on, or is withdrawn by the legislator who filed it for any number of reasons.
Once all the amendments have been filed, a small group of leadership and the committee chair will often group non-controversial amendments they want incorporated into the bill into “consolidated amendments.” Depending on how large the scope of the bill is, there can often be several consolidated amendments, labeled with a letter. Each consolidated amendment then gets a roll-call vote on its adoption into the bill. Consolidation saves time and allows us to focus on the more pressing or controversial amendments that are proposed. The Criminal Justice Reform Act only had Consolidated Amendment A which contained 18 amendments.
One of the major issues in the Criminal Reform Act voting centered around including amendments that would allow for harsher punishments for drug dealers when someone dies from the drugs they sold. Now, I think we can all agree that the opioid epidemic is a tragedy, killing 4-5 people a day in the Commonwealth. I agree strongly with the premise that drug traffickers should be punished to the fullest extent of the law. They are literally profiting off human misery and death.
To that end, an amendment was brought forward that would ostensibly give prosecutors the authority to charge these people with manslaughter or second-degree murder. Here’s the rub- prosecutors already have this authority under the current law. It makes absolutely no sense to vote for an amendment that would give them powers they already have. However, scrapping the idea all together doesn’t make sense either, so because the rules are extremely complicated, we voted to “further amend” the amendment, adding that the provision may go into effect following further study, although it is highly unlikely (again, because it is already what happens).
Another perfect example of how complicated the amendment process can be was a procedural vote on another amendment regarding immigration. The amendment concerned interaction and cooperation between local police and US Immigration enforcement on detainer requests for suspected illegal aliens. This vote had nothing to do with the merit or substance of the bill, just the amendment process itself.
When we are looking to pass a large bill like Criminal Justice Reform or the Marijuana Omnibus bill from this summer, we are usually looking at 80-90 pages already. The House and Senate both generally try to stick to the matter at hand to keep these bills from getting out of control and to keep focus on the important issues. Therefore, House rules restrict the subject matter that can be included in the bill.
That is why the Speaker Pro Tempore, Rep Haddad, decided to “lay aside” the immigration amendment- not because it is or isn’t a good piece of legislation, but because it was deemed to be outside the scope of what the bill was aiming to accomplish. It was not included in any earlier versions of the bill, and would introduce an entirely new subject not allowed under the House amendment process rules. The vote we took, similarly, was not on whether the amendment had merit, but on whether to uphold her decision to exclude it from the Criminal Justice bill. We did not necessarily reject it, but rather set it aside as a matter to be included in a future immigration bill. This is the same rule and vote that we took on another amendment involving wiretapping that I have also been asked about.
All in all, the amendment process for the bill took 2 days. We did pass several amendments to create what I believe to be a relatively balanced bill. It is now in conference committee, where a panel of Senators and Reps will hammer out the differences in the bill and create what will hopefully be a final draft to be passed in both houses sometime in January.
I hope people found this useful- like I said we got lots of questions about the arcane rules and complicated inner workings of the State House and its always good to go back to the basics. If you have any questions about this, or any other matter, I can be reached at [email protected] or (413) 572-3920. Have a great weekend!
