Wither the Senate?
Update: For those keeping count, the House is recessed until 5:30 p.m.
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If you're looking for action down on Jones Street, it's on the House side right now. The Gov. Mike Easley's negotiators are working with House members to come up with a compromise that would let everyone walk away from the special session happy, or at least make everyone equally miserable.
But the big question might be whether the Senate would go along with any such thing.
At this point, it doesn't look like anyone from the Senate is engaged in the negotiations, a fact confirmed by Sen. Tony Rand, D-Fayetteville, when I found him chatting up Rep. Jim Crawford, D-Granville, in a conference room a few minutes ago.
Rand is a primary sponsor of the bill and by all accounts displeased in a major way with the governor's veto.
I asked Rand if he or any of the other Senators were involved in the talks.
"We haven't been so far," he said. "We're not invited."
Crawford leaned over and asked, "Would you like to be?"
"Oh, if we're invited sure, we'll be nice," Rand said.
Crawford then joked, "I'll see what I can do about getting you a written invitation."
Crawford then left the room and Rand allowed as how he was a little mystified by the whole negotiation process anyway.
"I can't come to a clear understanding of what a compromise can be," Rand said. Easley has said that he's worried the bill, as it stand, would give up to $40 million to Goodyear but still allow them to fire workers.
Rand said that Easley could, as a condition of the grant, mandate that they not fire any of those workers.
"He could do all of that and he could do nothing," Rand said. Nothing, he said, compels the governor to offer the grant in the first place.
"I'm at a loss," Rand said.
Meanwhile, the House continues to negotiate. They are scheduled to come back from recess at 4:30 p.m., but Speaker Joe Hackney has pushed that time back several times already.
So, as I said above, if the House and the governor do reach a compromise, will the Senate even bother to hear about? The answer may be yes.
One possible - POSSIBLE - way this plays out is the House votes to let the governor's veto and then calls for another special session to pass the compromise legislation. The Senate, which really wants to do something for Goodyear, could get stuck talking about the compromise since they would never get the chance to vote on veto override.