It was great to learn yesterday that the Minnesota Senate hired former House member and recent Pawlenty aide Cal Ludeman to be the new Secretary of the Senate.
He has a lot of work to do to bring the Chamber up to the same high standards of process and debate as Chief Clerk Mathiowetz maintains in the House.
Here are a couple of administrative/housekeeping reforms:
Better journals: For people who track the voting habits of politicians, legislative journals are the evidence files. The Minnesota Constitution requires recorded roll call votes on bill passage so that legislators can be held accountable for their actions.
The Minnesota House provides easy access to both PDF and HTML versions of the Journal (a Word version may also be up there somewhere), but the Senate offers only PDF files for the whole day. In the bill status table, House roll call votes include a link to specific journal pages in HTML. The Senate version of the same bill status page does not link to the vote. Journals don’t start out as PDF files. They start out as text files or Word docs or some form of HTML and are then converted to clunky old PDFs. Saving them as webpages in addition to PDFs and then posting them online would cost about a nickel. Borrow some scripts from the House.
Better video: In the days of YouTube, online videos of public events should be presented in a user-friendly manner. The Minnesota House does a fantastic job of providing access to live and recorded floor sessions and committee hearings. There are at least two options for viewing and the online player includes not only a list of bills being considered, but the time each bill is brought up so viewers can quickly skip ahead to the bill they are interested in. In comparison, the Senate video feeds are right out of the silent film era. They seem designed to make it as difficult as possible for the public to follow along.
Kill the COW: This critical reform is probably already in the works, but the COW is such a rotten way of processing legislative sausage that it’s worth going over in detail.
What happens is the Senate “resolves itself into a Committee of the Whole,” which means the entire Senate literally meets on the floor as a committee of the Senate, not as the Senate. Committees can’t actually pass laws, they can only recommend that a bill be passed.
And since no bill is actually being passed, no roll call vote is required as per Art. 4, Sec. 22 of the Minnesota Constitution: “No law shall be passed unless voted for by a majority of all the members elected to each house of the legislature, and the vote entered in the journal of each house.”
Here’s the crux of the problem: Once the COW recommends a bill to pass, the bill is trundled off to the Senate Calendar to await its official passage by the Senate proper.
Time does not stand still while a bill sits on the Calendar, all bundled up and ready for a single action to pass it. Yet the 2010 DLF Senate Rules (Sec. 33.5) state that “An amendment is not in order to a bill on the Calendar or after third reading without the unanimous consent of the Senate.” So despite all of the debate that continues in state agencies, in the media, among the lobbyists and members of the public while a bill waits to be passed, Senators are prohibited from amending it.
What’s even worse is that Senators and members of the public simply forget what the bill is about in the days that have passed between the COW and Senate.
When the Senate has slapped together a long list of Calendar items, man, fasten your seat belts. In past years the Senate has passed as many as 107 bills in a single day! That gavel sounds like bullets through a Gatling gun. Ask Sen. Warren Limmer how receptive the DFL was to his simple request that each bill author provide a word or two about the bill before the vote. Not happening…