The Special Circus - Part 1

On Sunday, 6 August, the Governor announced from a groaning golf cart that he was calling a special session three hours before the session began at 4:00pm. I found out at 1:46, giving me little more than two hours for a five-hour drive. The Governor showed his typical disregard for much of the state, giving many legislators nowhere near enough time to get to the session before it began. Many of us were forced to drive at breakneck speed to get there to try to defend against Justice’s Socialist spending agenda.

We’d been told there might be a special session during interim committee meetings scheduled for Monday, so most legislators had prepared to go to Charleston, but there was no confirmation that the session would be Sunday afternoon. The GOP had a Zoom call earlier in the week to discuss potential special session issues, specifically on Volunteer Fire Departments.

On Saturday 5 August, the House leadership sent seven draft bills regarding our Corrections crisis, where we have deployed the National Guard for a year to our prison system. This, of course, follows the similar 2018 National Guard deployment to support our Corrections staff. This is costing taxpayers $19 million dollars a year to reimburse the federal government, and is not solving the crisis.

We also received unrelated five bills before the special session that had nothing to do with the reasons we were going into special session.

When the legislature convened, we did not face the expected 15 bills, but rather 90 bills that the Governor was trying to jam through for reasons I suspect did not reflect the actual needs of the state.  Half of these were duplicates, so if one part of the Legislature defeated a bill, the leadership could jam it through again.  Many of these were spending bills, including massive amounts for the Governor to spend on ‘projects’ of dubious value– hence the name - Special Circus.

By the time I arrived, 14 bills had already been processed.  Some bills made sense, such as several fixes to the PEIA bill we passed in the regular session.  One of the important bills we passed was a fix to help taxpayers with the tax credits for property taxes we passed in the regular session.  The attached graphic provides an explanation.

This was the easy part.  I’ll cover the rest of the Special Circus in my next post.

Montani Semper Liberi

Bill Ridenour