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The making of sausages and laws
By Joe Driver
TEXAS REPRESENTATIVE
CHAIRMAN, LAW ENFORCEMENT COMMITTEE
TEXAS HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
An often repeated saying heard around the state capitol in Austin goes something like this: there are two things you don�t want to see being made � sausages and laws. Even well-developed proposals, with all interested parties in agreement, can run into amazing difficulties in the 140-day biennial phenomenon that we call a regular Texas legislative session.
Case in point. Last year, your ASSIST leaders worked with representatives of the Texas Burglar and Fire Alarm Association, Texas Locksmiths Association, and Texas Association of Licensed Investigators and agreed to ask the legislature to make several changes in the Texas Private Security Act, which governs all four of these professions. They sought and received the approval of the regulatory bodies, too � both the Department of Public Safety Private Security Bureau (state agency) and the Texas Private Security Board (industry and public members who advise DPS). ASSIST representatives and the other groups spent many weeks working on proposed changes to the law that would make it fairer and more manageable for the industry and its employees, as well as improve public safety.
The result of all the hard work was what we call an omnibus bill, a proposed law that packages together several measures into one. The bill clarified hearing procedures to simplify the process and provide more due process to applicants and those whose licenses have been denied, suspended, or revoked. It also provided better definitions of eligibility requirements, such as chemical dependency and incapability of exercising sound judgment with respect to the use and storage of a handgun. It updated eligibility requirements for licenses, registrations and commissions issued under the Private Security Act. Among other things, it reduced the length of time for which criminal convictions will disqualify applicants. The bill also increased civil penalties for operating without a license required under the act from $1,000 to $10,000. Finally, the bill made numerous non-substantive changes regarding the name of the administering agency and board, a problem that was created when we changed this from a stand-alone agency to a department within DPS a few sessions back.
Every private security organization represented in the working group agreed to fully support all of the proposals in the bill, without change, and not to ask for any other changes to the Private Security Act during the 2007 session of the legislature.
After an agreement was reached within the private security industries, the next crucial step was recruiting the right legislator to author the bill. As three-term chairman of the Law Enforcement Committee through which the bill would have to pass before it could become law, I was the ideal author for the bill. My staff and I are very familiar with the regulation of your industry, having worked on private security laws that were passed in previous sessions. Your representatives convinced me that the changes in law they were requesting, would be beneficial to your industry and all Texans. So I agreed to serve as bill author. In doing so, I committed myself and my staff to work this proposal through the highly complex legislative process, without allowing any changes or additions to the bill by other legislators. Not an easy task.
PROBLEM # 1
I introduced House Bill 2833 March 7. It was referred to the Law Enforcement Committee, where I held a public hearing on it April 16. Even though we had all agreed that we would accept no changes in the bill, one small amendment was necessary to correct a serious technical error that was made by the legislative attorney who put the bill together for us. Several legislators tried to make substantive changes to the bill while it was in committee, but I stood fast against any and all amendments, because any changes would void the intra-industry agreement. On April 19, I reported the bill out of my committee and placed it on the House Consent Calendar, where members aren�t able to amend a bill. The House passed it May 2 in perfect condition. So far, everything had gone (almost) as smoothly as anticipated.
PROBLEM #2
The next step in the legislative process was to pass the bill in the
Senate. (A bill has to pass both chambers of the legislature in exactly the same form and be signed by the Governor to become law.) For unknown reasons, perhaps because the Senate thought the House was moving slowly on Senate bills, the bill sat idle for 12 days before the lieutenant governor referred it to the Criminal Justice Committee for their consideration. That was our second surprise and the first delay in what we hoped would be a fast moving train. Were it not for the non-stop efforts of my staff to get it moving, this bill might have languished until it was too late to pass it this session.
PROBLEM #3
The third bump-in-the-road came in the Senate committee hearing, when a witness from a research group spoke in opposition to the bill. As it turned out, he wasn�t really opposed to the bill, but he wanted to use the public hearing as an opportunity to discuss the wisdom of banning criminals convicted of certain crimes from being licensed to work in the regulated occupations. All of us � ASSIST, the other industry groups, my staff and myself � scrambled to immediately convince the witness to change his stance from �against� the bill to �on� the bill. We also had to go into overdrive to convince the members of the Senate committee, including the chairman, that the bill should not be held up so that the issue could be researched and debated. Doing so would undoubtedly have killed the proposal, because there simply was not enough time left in the 140-day session for that process. Fortunately, we were successful. The crisis was averted, and the bill sailed out of Senate committee.
PROBLEM #4
On May 24, HB 2833 came up for a vote in the Senate. We were working for the bill to pass that day in the same form it passed in the House � with no amendments � and go on to the bovernor for his signature. However, the unexpected almost becomes expected during the last few days of every legislative session, and HB 2833 did not escape this curse. I was on the House floor when my legislative aide Cody McGregor phoned me with an urgent message: I needed to get over to the Senate, where the Criminal Justice Committee
Chairman John Whitmire had just offered an amendment that could blow apart the entire agreement and make the bill
controversial. At this late hour in the session, we had no time for meetings to hash out our differences. Instead, I went straight to the Senate to talk directly to Whitmire, who agreed to withdraw the amendment so long as we promised to look at his issue before the next legislative session. When it comes to resolving serious problems, there is just no substitute for colleague-to-colleague interaction among legislators. Another crisis was averted.
PROBLEM #5
Then a common late-session phenomenon began � senators attempting to amend the bill to add unrelated provisions that had not made it through the legislative process in the form of bills they had introduced. (Sometimes, a bill gets so many other bills added to it as amendments that we call it a �Christmas tree.�) Unlike in the House, where we were able to pass the bill with no substantive changes, by the time the Senate passed HB 2833, four amendments had been added. Not only did this mean that the bill would have to go back to the House of Representatives and possibly to a Conference Committee if the House didn�t agree to the amendments, but also it meant that the bill was no longer the exact bill that the four trade associations had agreed to support.
The possibility now existed that one or more of the trade groups could withdraw their support or even oppose the bill as passed by the Senate. To avoid that, I convinced my House colleagues to refuse to agree to the Senate amendments and to request a conference committee. (A conference committee is five members of the House and five members of the Senate, appointed by their presiding officers.) The conferees quickly agreed to take off all the Senate amendments and return the bill to the original form that passed in my House committee in April.
PROBLEM #6
Even though it was now the last day a conference committee report could be passed in the session under House and Senate rules, in any normal year we could have all breathed a sigh of relief, knowing that passage by both chambers would be routine. That�s exactly what happened in the Senate. But this was far from a normal session in the House.
Efforts by some legislators to remove House Speaker Tom Craddick from his leadership post led to a serious melt-down in the
House, with much of the day taken up by motions and debate to accomplish that purpose. When the midnight deadline arrived for passage of conference committee reports, the House had not taken up HB 2833.
The only hope for HB 2833 at this point was for me to convince the House to vote to suspend its own rules so that we could consider it. When the House lost its quorum in the early morning hours because of opposition to the speaker, it was forced to adjourn.
That left only the 140th day to pull a rabbit out of a hat and get HB 2833 passed. After all the months of work on reaching an agreement among the trade associations and all the work in the legislature by industry representatives, my staff, and myself, the bill was on life-support.
Hat-tricks happen. At 8:05 p.m., May 28, with the legislature less than four hours away from adjourning until January 2008, I convinced the House to suspend its rules and pass the bill. The vote was 143-0. On June 15, Governor Rick Perry signed it into law.
THE MORAL OF THIS STORY
The next time you wonder why your ASSIST representatives are spending so much time in Austin and asking you to support their legislative
efforts, if you wonder how hard it can be to convince the Texas Legislature to adopt good public policy related to your industry, just remember, there�s a good reason you don�t want to see the making of either sausages or laws.
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