The Senate Rejects the House Amendments to SB 17 and SB 18

The Senate rejected the House amendments to SB 17 and SB 18 last night. Both bills will now be sent back to the House for appointment of conferees. The bill(s) now follow the following process:

• The House appoints conferees and engages in negotiations to reconcile the two versions of the bills
• The House does not appoint conferees, in which case the bill(s) die.
• If the bills go to conference, the committees either reach an agreement between the majority of conferees from each side, or the bill(s) die.
• If the conferees reach agreement, both houses have to adopt the conference committee report(s) (CCRs) by majority vote or the bill(s) die.
• If the chambers both adopt, the bill(s) go to the Governor.

Conference committee reports must be completed and filed by midnight Saturday. Reports must be adopted by midnight Sunday. The reports have to lay out for 24 hours before adoption. So, for example, a report filed at 2PM Saturday could not be taken up till 2PM Sunday. Though this process seems very complicated, CCRs are routinely drafted and reported on hundreds of bills in these last days of the session. A problem with the conference committee process is that it is mostly just between members, and not a public input exercise like a committee hearing.

The Senate conferees are:

• SB 17: Creighton, Hinojosa, Campbell, Flores, Parker
• SB 18: Creighton, Bettencourt, Campbell, King, Middleton

These are very strong conferees, especially on SB 18, who will defend the Senate versions of the bills. Because the Senate and House versions of SB 18 do pretty much the opposite thing, with one codifying tenure and one eliminating it, it is hard to fathom a compromise between the two.

We are waiting on the bill to be returned to the House for the appointment of conferees.