One has to ask: What is the real purpose of giving a 24-hour notice for standing committee agendas in the Legislature?
Take this very, very odd happenstance – that results in a House rule change properly agendaed but with a proposed bill no one could read Monday morning.
Last Thursday night, House Democrats made House Republicans very angry when the Dems tried to lift Herbert’s Healthy Utah Medicaid expansion bill, SB164, from a House standing committee and have it voted on by the whole 75-member body.
The Dems wanted the Republicans on the record on the Healthy Utah plan – since House Speaker Greg Hughes, R-Draper, had been saying for days that the House wasn’t going to hear SB164 on the floor.
That would be a waste of time, said Hughes, because in a closed House caucus the bill didn’t have nearly any votes.
A lot of public complaints about that one – and ultimately SB164 was voted on, in a way, when Dems tried to substitute into the House’s own Medicaid expansion bill.
Anyway, using an internal rule of procedure, the Dems got their vote Thursday night, but not before angry Republicans opened a new bill file on House rules – aimed at punishing the Democrats and stopping this from ever happening again.
(This is what I guess HR6 does.)
Even though the Rules Committee meeting Monday at noon was properly put on the agenda 24 hours in advance – as GRAMA requires – there is no HR6 listed.
While introduced, it has no text. You can’t look it up.
And what is even weirder, is that the Rules Committee is listed as meeting in the Toltan Room. On the agenda there is reportedly a map so you can find the Toltan Room, but the map links (and I’m not kidding about this) the Center For Space Research at the University of Texas.
Maybe the eight-member House Rules Committee is taking an old Space Shuttle to the meeting – but I’m not getting on that plane.
Stay tuned to UtahPolicy, and we’ll try to tell you what HR6 is, where you can read it, and how you can get to the Toltan Room – where ever that is.
In the meantime, what is the use of giving a 24-hour agenda warning if you can’t read the bill the standing committee is going to discuss?
Yes, the House majority followed the GRAMA law – little good it does the public.
UPDATE:
The text of HR6 has been made public. You can read it here.
