Bills Posted Yesterday (Yes, Saturday) For Hearings on Monday or Tuesday
On Saturday, a bunch of bills were posted for RI House committee hearings on Monday or Tuesday. Many of the bills, on the surface, look somewhere between innocuous and silly (e.g. H0623, which increases the weigh-in period for mixed martial arts matches from 24 to 36 hours), but folks knowledgeable in the ways of the RI legislature may be interested in going through the list, and letting us know if there’s anything that would qualify as an attempt to slip a bill through the legislature, before the public has become fully aware of its content…
House Finance Bills
House Health, Education and Welfare Bills
House Corporations Bills
House Environment and Natural Resources Bills
There is nothing nefarious going on here; the opposite actually. Leadership wants to wrap things up for the session on schedule on Thursday. But in order to have things posted on Wednesday’s calendar and still allow the usual 48 hour posting rules following committee votes, they needed to have committee hearings on Monday. Otherwise, they would have taken place on Tuesday and Thursday’s calendar would have been much longer while Wednesday’s shorter. It’s just a logistical thing. They did check with us (the GOP) last week before they did this to make sure we were OK with it. These committee meetings next week, while technically posted as “hearings” and open to the public, are most likely just going to be voting sessions.
If you want to see something odd, notice that on next week’s floor calendar a few House bills have been ordered on the calendar (i.e. not gone through a committee vote). I don’t yet know why that is. It may be perfectly fine, but I haven’t had time to inquire about the reasoning yet.
To be clear – whether any of this stuff is worthy of passage is a whole separate question, but I wouldn’t read anything into the timing of it other than the obvious fact that it is all post-budget vote.
Does that mean that this is a dump of budget-leverage legislation? “Vote for our budget first, and we’ll squeeze your bill in before the calendar runs out.”
Ok, even though there seemed to be some brevity about the MMA bill, this is actually the opposite of what is needed. They really need same-day weigh ins as many fighters gain 15-20 lbs post-weigh in even when it is 24 hrs in advance. Now we’re going to give them more time? What this often leads to is fighters who can be 20-25 lbs apart fighting each other. Make the weigh in less time before the fight and the weights will be loser together.
Time to contact the committee, I guess
S0325 – 2% tax on medical images, excluding mammographies.. NICE.