The Constitution
provides for an automatic override session held by the Legislature, unless a
majority of members in at least one chamber calls it off by sending in a ballot
to their presiding officer stating as such within 35 days after the end of the
regular session. This never has happened in the four decades under this version
of the Constitution.
Two factors tend to discourage the impulse to have one of these
sessions. One is the override requirement of two-thirds majorities in each
chamber. With just a pair of vetoes ever overridden during regular sessions in
these 40 years, governors have shown they have figured out when to cast vetoes
that stick because of the extra votes needed beyond passage or those needed that
allow an override session to happen. So even as it matters to have a majority wishing
to override vetoes, unless they know they can pull in additional supporters for
the override votes that are unlikely to come from those who sent in ballots to
cancel the thing, having an extra session is useless.
This is compounded by the fact the session is costly both to taxpayers
and legislators. Lawmakers would have to interrupt their lives for a few days –
if not their regular jobs if they have them but also perhaps cancelling scheduled
summertime leisure activities maybe centered around families – while costing
the state starting at over $16,000 a day in per
diem payments to them and going up from there. And if nothing gets overridden,
then they have opened themselves up to charges of wasting taxpayer dollars on
themselves.
Not that the decision to go for a session gets lackluster support. In
fact, typically there’s always a critical mass of support for a session when,
as is currently the case and has been since 2004 except for a couple of years,
one party controls both majoritarian branches of government, from the minority
party. Last
year, the House actually technically approved of a session by one vote, on
the strength of 37 Democrats requesting.
But the trick is to get majority party members to supplement, which
occurs either out of laziness in returning ballots that happens when they think
it’s going to be cancelled regardless, or because enough of them have gotten
riled over individual vetoes over entire bills or with line items. The laziness
factor (which probably explains most of the more than dozen House GOP held
ballots of last year) practically disappears when it’s not obvious a session
won’t be held (last year, well before the time limit was up a large
number of senators made known they had sent in ballots), so finding enough
disaffected majority party members is the key.
It’s possible, in that different members can be upset by different
vetoes cast by Gov. Bobby
Jindal. For example, with his axing of HB
516 by Democrat state Rep. Walt Leger that
would have expanded the footprint of New Orleans’ convention center authority
both in jurisdiction and revenue-raising, this might perturb area Republicans.
Or there is his rejection of SB
50 by state Sen. Dale Erdey of a special financing arrangement benefitting
a Livingston Parish development that might rile Erdey and other area
Republicans. And in HB
1 a number of line item vetoes of programs might be enough to irritate their
GOP backers, given
an enthusiastic prodding, into action. So if enough vetoes are out there
that separately affect different legislators detrimentally enough in terms of
constituent agitation and/or in crossing their belief systems, then a session
could happen.
However, as override
session supporters concede, that dynamic does not seem to be present sufficiently
this year. Further, because of the supermajority requirement, more than just the
requisite logrolling among those legislators with a stake in vetoed things that
could stop a session cancellation need to be convinced to override anything.
So, does a rural North Louisiana representative, for example, even though the
House voted unanimously for SB 50, really want to go to the wall just to give a
tax break to a developer that would siphon money out of the general fund that might
otherwise go to his district – especially when the governor and others will be
telling the world about his vote?
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