News-Record.com

As the initial flood of bills began rolling into the clerks’ offices last week, I was flashing back to a post (click here) I wrote back almost two years ago. Republicans were complaining they weren’t being included in the legislative process and that their bills weren’t being allowed to move by key deadlines.

The result of all that pondering was a story for Monday’s paper. Click here to read that story.

Let’s start at the beginning.

Every legislative session for the past several, you’ll see a series of bills filed to do things like impose restrictions on the growth of the state budget or add a state constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.

By and large, those bills go nowhere. That’s in large part due to the fact that those bills are introduced by philosophically conservative, mainly Republican legislators. The House and Senate are controlled by Democrats who may not perhaps be the most liberal specimens of their parties have no desire to trod an ideologically right-of-center path.

Now, there has been a lot of buzz on the House side among Republicans that they’ll have a better shot at running these conservative bills (Republican leader Rep. Paul Stam insists they’re bipartisan and shouldn’t be called “minority bills” or “Republican bills”) because of Rep. Joe Hackney’s election as Speaker.

Basically, I’m going to rain on this parade a little bit, although I do think these bills will have a better shot at getting committee hearings this time around. Here’s why the cloudy forecast for these ideologically right-of-center bills:

• The Senate’s leadership has not changed very much. With Pro Tempore Marc Basnight opening up his eighth session in the chamber’s top spot, he’s shown no real inclination to bring those bills up. In a phone conversation last week, he basically said that legislative time is limited and he wants to spend it on bills that have a shot at passing.

• Hackney does seem like he’ll be more open minded toward these types of bills, to a point. But in an interview last week he emphasized the Speaker’s discretion to control the flow of legislation. Click here to listen to his comments on the subject.

• Even if a conservative bill does make it to the House floor and does pass, the Senate still won’t be bound to take it up. I somehow can’t see Hackney going toe-to-toe with Basnight on behalf of conservative bill when they’ll be negotiating things like the budget.

• The bulk of the Democrats in the House and Senate are going to dance with thems that brought ‘em, and know that the formula of focusing on economic issues and steering clear of social flashpoints won the day in a 2006 election year that could have gone very poorly for them.

Some more audio on the topic:

• Sen. Phil Berger, the minority leader in the Senate. (We also talk a little zero-based budgeting.)

• Rep. Paul “Skip” Stam, the minority leader in the House. Again, he says bill like the marriage amendment bills should not be called “Republican bills” because they had Democratic sponsors.

• Rep. John Blust, Republican of Greensboro.