Inside Baseball: Blust’s rule reforms are killed
Way back before the beginning of the session, Rep. John Blust proposed changing the rules under which the chamber ran. The idea, he said, was to take power out of the hands of a few and make the House more small-d democratic.
The changes, he said, would avoid some of fund-raising and ethics-related problems that have surfaced over the past year. If power isn’t concentrated in the hands of a few, the reasoning go, there’s less reason to give those few money.
Changing the rules, Blust said, would be kin to all the other ethics reforms the legislature has been working on this year.
Blust had hoped to make the new rules effective at the end of this year’s session. That way the new House coming in next year would have the Blust’s framework to work with when they adopted rules for the chamber next year.
No dice on that idea, though.
The House Rules Committee killed that change Monday evening on a voice vote. No member of the committee spoke up in favor of the rules change.
Blust, however, was upbeat after the hearing.
"I'm getting more and more people saying 'I like some of your stuff in here' ... this keeps the momentum going."