So… yesterday the state House Republicans could not muster the votes to override Gov. Bev Perdue’s veto of H2, the bill that seeks to exempt North Carolinians from the federal health care law. The vote was 68-51, four short of the three-fifths majority the House needs for a veto override.(Details in today’s e-edition.)
Done deal, right.
Nope.
Along about 11:30 a.m. this morning, House Republicans announce they’re going to take a recess until 1:45 p.m.. Democrats say “Hey, we’ve only got a couple bills on the calendar. Why don’t we knock them out and go home for the weekend.”
“Sorry,” came the reply from Republicans, “We have a long-held joint caucus meeting. It’s unavoidable, really.”
Well, House Minority Leader Joe Hackney asked the House Speaker Thom Tillis if there was anything other than those two bills due to come up during the afternoon. Hackney was assured there was nothing else coming.
Oh, wait a minute.
Sometime after that conversation, Tillis informed Hackney that House Republicans wanted to reconsider the health care bill veto.
Hackney protested, saying he had already released members to go home and take care of business. In fact, he had released enough Democrats that Republicans could have shoved through a veto override today if they wanted.(A quick note on reconsideration: This is legit parliamentary tool. It is most often used to pull back and tweak a bill that was sent along with a drafting error. On more rare occasions, it has been used to revive bills that lost votes while some supporters were out of the chamber. It has never been used by a North Carolina legislative body on a veto.)
Tillis and the Republicans apparently gave Hackney’s protest some thought, and struck a bargain with the Democrats. So shortly after 1:45 p.m., the House voted 112-0 to suspend a particular rule.
Ordinarily, lawmakers must vote to reconsider a bill (read: bring it back from defeat) the day after that defeat happens. The vote Thursday allows that reconsideration vote, with regards to H2, to happen at any point during this legislative session.
Tillis told reporters that reconsideration vote would come next week.
As a matter of procedure, House Majority Leader Skip Stam will ask to change his vote on H2. He’ll then be on “the prevailing side” and would then have the power to move for reconsideration. (Hackney said that vote switch was “a matter of some debate,” but it looks to me like the rules would allow it.) That reconsideration only takes half the voting members plus 1. Then Republicans can stash H2 in a committee and keep it fresh for the rest of the session, just in case the governor hacks off some of her Democratic allies or there’s another day when everybody doesn’t show up.
Keep in mind, Republicans could have done all that (or actually executed the veto override all the way) Thursday.
I asked Hackney if he though Republicans were being honest in their dealings with the Democrats.
“Well, I don’t want to get into things like that,” Hackney said. “At the end of the day, they didn’t do it.”
Tillis said Republicans showed good faith by not ramming through the veto override and that it would be his office policies to keep all vetoed bills alive until the end of session.
“I just think it adds a level of leverage back on our side that strengthens this branch, and I think that’s appropriate,” Tillis said.Tillis also gave a nod to Hackney, who was Speaker for the two sessions before this one, saying that Hackney had extended similar courtesies to Republicans during his four year tenure. There was not always such fair play under previous Speakers, Tillis said, pointing particular to the lottery bill. Many of his members urged him to go ahead push the veto override.
“If we used the politics of the past, before Speaker Hackney, House Bill 2 would be overridden today, and it’s not,” Tillis said.
