Idaho House Works to Get ‘er Done

By Sharon Fisher, 3-12-08

The Idaho House hopped to it today, clearing not only the backlog of its own bills and Senate bills but also whipping through several appropriations bills that typically wouldn’t have been voted on til tomorrow.

It’s a slick legislative maneuver that gets done to bring up a bill from the second reading calendar to be voted on. It was previously done in this session on a field-burning bill to get it completed as quickly as possible, but in this case it was just being done to reduce the backlog of bills and get done faster.

First, the body needs to vote on whether to consider a bill in the second reading calendar – and after the first vote was done, Majority Leader Representative Mike Moyle, R-Star, streamlined the procedure even more by asking for a unanimous consent request – in other words, “speak up if you have a problem, otherwise we’re going with it” – for the vote on each of the other bills.

The bills themselves were largely fairly innocuous appropriations bills with little debate that went through pretty quickly: appropriations for the Idaho Commission for the Arts, colleges and universities, the State Board of Education, the Department of Agriculture, and the Department of Parks and Recreation, as well as a bill relating to licensing of ATVs.