News-Record.com

This Simon & Garfunkel moment brought to you by the House Appropriations process, which tapped the breaks Thursday afternoon.

Both Speaker Joe Hackney and House Majority Leader Rep. Hugh Holliman were talking earlier this afternoon like the House could roll out its budget Monday evening. Holliman said the hope was that the full bill could be distributed to members Monday evening at caucus meetings.

To get that done, the House Appropriations subcommittees were scheduled to meet late this afternoon. For the uninitiated, the Appropriations Committee divides its work between seven sub-committees. Each of those have to sign off - at least in theory - before the full budget bill can be presented.

While a couple subs, General Government and Transportation, had some sort of meeting, others were cancelled. For example, Rep. Verla Insko waved off the Health and Human Service subcommittee before they even started.

On their way out for the day, the big chairs (the highest ranking members of the Appropriations and Finance committees) said they were finished for the week.

Rep. Maggie Jeffus, an Appropriations chair, wouldn't say for absolute sure nothing would happen Friday, but she noted the committees were being released for members to go home.

"Once they've gone home, I don't know how we'd go about getting them back," Jeffus said.

The general impression seems to be that appropriators want more time to work and more time to see if any more money is going to be generated on the tax/revenue side of the equation.

As perilous as it may be to predict these things, the tentative schedule seems to run along the following:

• Democrats will caucus Monday evening to discuss their budget plans.
• Jeffus said that subcommittees could run on Tuesday.
• Given that schedule, it's would be possible to run the full budget bill later that week.

While all this caused a good deal of a stir among lobbyist and us scruffy press types today, this is only one step in a long hard slog. The governor has already released his work of fiction budget proposal, which the House has ignored. After the House gets done with its bill, the Senate will ignore their version and write their own. Then all three will get together and write the final bill.

Stay tuned.