On this, the final day of the regular legislative session, the House and Senate each convened just before 9:30 a.m, with a deadline of 6 p.m. to complete their business.
Having gotten the budget out of the way Sunday evening, what are they doing today? For many, a whole lot of waiting.
“Members, if you could hang around for a couple of minutes. We just need to make sure we have a quorum, so please, nobody stray away,” House Speaker Taylor Barras said at one point, then the “couple of minutes” stretched into a couple of hours.
But as you look around the House and Senate chambers while they’re waiting, you’ll see small groups of senators and representatives talking. These are the conference committees, hashing out disagreements over certain bills.
These meetings are generally cordial, according to Senator Dan Claitor, speaking on one bill where the House rejected his amendment.
“Rejecting it was a good thing, so it gives us all an opportunity to work on that,” Claitor explained.
Rep. Chris Broadwater says most conference committees are fairly efficient.
“It generally goes pretty quickly because we’ve already taken up the bills at least once, sometimes twice; debated them, studied them,” Broadwater explained. “And so we’re pretty familiar what the issues are, and can get to a decision relatively quickly.”
Not always, however.
“Where it becomes a bit more challenging is, in the event there remains disagreement – either within members of the House, or between the House and the Senate – then you have to do a little more than just have side conferences on the floor of the chamber. You need to then, at that point, actually schedule a sit-down meeting with the six conferees and really try to hash out and negotiate,” Broadwater said, with a rueful grin. “And I’ve been a part of some of those.”
But without the budget in the mix today, there’s confidence.
“We’ll get it done.”