It's the last day of the special Legislative session. “Everything that we’ve done up to now is preliminary to have the final big votes that come out of conference reports,” says Representative Sam Jones, D-Franklin.
Small groups of three Senators and three Representatives are meeting throughout the Capitol, trying to come to agreement on clean pennies, sunsets and the depth of cuts to state services. Jones says the composition of those committees is crucial.
“The prevailing power structure of each house sets it up the way they want it to come out,” he says.
The Senate President chooses his appointees. On the House side, it's the Speaker.
“Of course, you’ll always have the author of the bill, but then the Speaker gets to appoint two other people. And there’s a lot of power in that, you know, the Speaker wields by being able to pick and choose who he wants,” says Jones.
One of the important bills is Representative Jay Morris' House Bill 61, which started out to clean a penny of existing sales tax. The Senate changed that to four pennies. “I don’t think the bill can advance out of this House with the four clean pennies," says Morris, "but you never know. It’s politics and strange things can happen.”
Morris says he doesn't want to gouge business, and he's willing to compromise, "just so everybody pays something so nobody has to pay a whole lot.”
Jones says, based on the session thus far, he's not overly optimistic. “You would hope that when the conference committees – like in this particular session, because the stakes are so high – they would pretty much be mirroring what the leadership has already cobbled together with the two houses and the governor. But if those conference committees turn out to be – either side – the majority of two out of three that are obstructionist, we have a problem.”