News-Record.com

A few notes on yesterday, today and tomorrow:

• The House vote on the smoking bill was 55-61. Click here to see how your rep voted.

• Click here for my prior post on the smoking bill.

• I could slice and dice a lot of audio of the debate, but this four minute clip of debate between Reps. Hugh Holliman and John Blust pretty much sums things up.

• After the vote, Holliman said that he had lost votes from folks who had said they would support the bill.

• Rep. Paul "Skip" Stam, the House minority leader, attempted to deliver the clincher motion - which would have killed the bill for good. What was either a misunderstanding or some fancy rhetorical footwork by Speaker Joe Hackney (pick your theory) kept that from going down. Still, Holliman seemed to think it was unlikely that they'd try to resurrect this bill.

• The House budget subcommittees will begin running at 8:30 a.m. Thursday morning. Rep. Alma Adams, one of the appropriations committee chairs, said she was pretty confident the subs would be looking over their parts of the budget bill. Unless the honorables plan on working on the weekend, that means they'll be running the full budget next week.

• Someone I have a lot of respect for pointed out today that I may have been snarkier than intended in this post. Quoting:

  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.

  The governor, to my knowledge, has only written one work of fiction in his life, and it’s a children's book. (By contrast, my timecards are more or less completely fictional on a bi-weekly basis...yeah I work 40 hours a week...on Pluto.) Of course, what I meant to get across was the governor writes his budget and the honorables all nod and run off and construct their own.

  At the end of the budget process, the governor's budget along with the House and Senate versions are blended into the final version. And only the items in all three versions are eligible to be included.

Okay, that's it for tonight. Let's do this all again tomorrow.