Gold Dome Digest – Sine Die
Artificial time crunch closes the door on some bad bills, but much of the damage was already done.
Sine Die, the last day of legislative session, is usually characterized by a frantic atmosphere as legislators and their staffs race to beat the clock by hook or by crook. Legislators hatch closed-door plans to graft legislation that didn’t make the ‘Crossover Day’ cut’ onto more successful bills with little time for other legislators to notice or act. Alternatively, bills with House and Senate differences not reconciled until the end could go to a ‘conference committee’: a hand-picked squad of “yes” voters from each chamber who get to have a private meeting and emerge with a bill that need bear no resemblance to the one they had come to discuss, and few people outside the committee would get to read in full before it became law.
This year, the final day of session felt dead. Of course, there were legislative shenanigans as mentioned above, and plenty of costumed protesters followed by cameras. But the protests themselves spoke to the salient feeling under the Gold Dome – that the biggest ship had sailed. Along with the other high-profile bills of the session like HB316 regarding the state’s electronic voting machines, the major battles that defined the 2019 session were already en route to Governor Kemp’s desk. To many seasoned observers, the multiple breaks for the House chamber to “stand at ease” -read: do nothing – were likely engineered to give a ceremonial end to the day with just enough tension to be camera-worthy. And maybe to shut the door on just a few pieces that the Speaker’s Office didn’t intend to let out of the chamber.
HB 217 (Gaines, R-Athens) would clarify that employees of syringe services programs (which provide substance abuse counseling) would be immune from civil and criminal liability for the possession of syringes/needles. After resisting ‘needle exchange’ programs for many years, the legislature has recently started to accept the notion of ‘harm reduction’ as a way to help stem the tide of new HIV infections in Georgia. Georgia has the nation’s highest rate of new infections and is closely related to the opioid epidemic now affecting some of the state’s most sparsely populated and remote counties.
HB 213 (Corbett, R-Lake Park). This bill, called the “Georgia Hemp Farming Act”, is a lengthy bill which would provide for rules, regulations, and supervision of hemp farming/agriculture in the state.
HB 324 (Gravley, R-Douglasville) would allow for the legal production, manufacture, purchase, and sale of THC oil in Georgia. Certain individuals who suffer from a list of qualified disease may currently possess THC oil, but they cannot legally buy THC oil in the state – this bill would change that.
HB 345 (Cooper, R-Marietta) would put into place restrictions on how pregnant inmates (and inmates who recently gave birth) can be strip-searched, handcuffed, and shackled.
HB 511, the transportation-agency-reorganization tome I wrote about in past entries had a wild ride, flipping the rideshare tax imposition from a flat 50-cent fee to a 9% tax and then back to the flat fee, was inserted into Senate Bill 200.
SB 200 mainly deals with the procedure for contract bidding for GDOT work. However on Friday of last week while the Gwinnett delegation was elsewhere, language was inserted into the bill extending the cooling-off period following the failed Gwinnett MARTA referendum of March 19th for an additional 7 years to 2026, beyond the one year currently provided in statute. That language was removed even before the bill was sent to conference committee, but the clock ran out before either chamber was able to adopt the committee report to give final passage. That bill and any other that was tabled or did not fail outright remains alive for the 2020 session.
