The last week?
So Jack Betts and I were on Legislative Week in Review this weekend yakking about hogs, legislative process, guns and the mentally ill and "the end of the legislative session."
With regard to that last bit: the conventional wisdom says that the honorable will wrap up things sometime on Friday. Guesses vary as to whether that will be Friday in the wee hours of the morning, middle of the day or maybe bleeding over into Saturday. And five days out, I'd be a fool to hazard a prediction. Things have a weird way of getting gummed up at the end of session.
For those who are newcomers to the legislative process, here's what we're talking about: The General Assembly meets over the course of two years. In odd number years, it begins its session in January and typically ends during the summer - usually the end of July or August. Then it goes home - barring a special session - until May of the even number year.
In 2008, we picked up the honorables in May after the Thomas Wright affair and after the primary elections. This legislative "short" session is primarily aimed at taking care of a budget revision (basically an update of the two-year spending plan passed in 2007) as well as cleaning up legislation left hanging last year and taking on some pressing issues.
Now, those who have been paying attention might have notice Gov. Mike Easley hasn't signed the budget revision yet. That's the case as of 12:01 a.m. this morning, unless he's made a decision and not sent word about it yet.
Don't expect the honorables to decamp until that budget is signed into law, has gone into effect on its own or we have a veto showdown on our hands.
What now?
Well, the most straightforward way for a bill to become law is for the governor to sign it. But if the governor neither signs nor vetoes the thing, it goes into effect 10 days after it hits his desk. So here are two dates to look at this week:
- * The fun-sized CR put in place when a budget deal wasn't done on schedule runs out on July 15 - Tuesday. I would expect - expect but not guarantee - something to happen by then. It would just seem silly to let the items in the CR slide just over an inter-branch wrasslin' matching.
- * If Easley does just let the bill sit without veto or signature, the 10 day clock runs out late on Friday night.
There's been no clear sign or signal out of the governor's office that would allow me to divine exactly he's planning on doing. Certainly, his rhetoric over the bill cooled off some when it was sent his way, but that's just reading tea leaves. I'm not going write right now about the possibility of a veto, because we'd be diving into a whole different kettle of fish there - all of them with big pointy teeth and bad dispositions.
Aside from last-minute jostling over the budget, what can you expect to see this week? If it truly is the last week of session, things will run at a mad-cap pace. You'll almost certainly see some drought legislation pass, along with a whole lot of bills that have gotten close enough to completion it would be silly to leave them on the table. And there will be some folks who get up and complain that their pet bill that passed one chamber didn't get a hearing in the other - such as the annexation moratorium.
When the session finally is over, the honorables will adjourn Sine Die. It's a fancy Latin term that means "without any future date being designated," but a better translation of its common usage is "done permanently." Basically, the General Assembly adjourns Sine Die when it's done with its work for the whole two-year session. It would only come back to Raleigh for special sessions, such as to talk about a veto over-ride or at the call of the governor to handle some pressing bit of business, such as the session that created an economic incentive package for Dell. The honoralbes can also call themselves back, although I've never heard tell of that happening in modern times.