It's Complicated
This post is for the hardcore among you. If the excruciating details of the legislative process bore you, feel free to skip it.
First, you might want to review our "steps" page summarizing what is involved in getting the Gourmet Beer Bill signed into law and where we stand right now. The point to keep in mind is that although we introduce and push two bills (one in the Senate, one in the House), only one of them will make it all the way through both houses and onto the Governor's desk. Having two bills is simply a strategy to maximize our opportunities.
With that in mind, the most likely path I now see to the Governor's desk may be confusing to casual observers. For here is what will probably happen:
Although they are doing better than last year, the Senate has again wasted several days this year locked in filibuster, and I wouldn't be at all surprised to see more slowdowns in that body before the '09 session is over. So our opportunities to hit the floor for a vote in the Senate are fewer and farther between than in the House.
There is a pretty good chance the Senate will be ready to deal with the Gourmet Beer Bill next week (on either 3/10 or 3/12) but they will only be considering bills that originated in the Senate, not bills (like HB373) that originated in the House. HB373 probably won't even be procedurally ready to hit the Senate floor anytime next week as it still has to pass the Senate Tourism committee and receive its "2nd reading" in the Senate before it can be voted on.
All that to say, if the Senate votes on any Gourmet Beer Bill next week, it will be SB132. And here's where it might confuse some people. If that happens, our issue will have passed a successful vote in the House and a successful vote in the Senate, but each vote will have been on a different bill. Therefore, neither bill will be ready to go to the Governor. We'll still have to pass one more vote in either the House or the Senate (definitely not both) before we can head to the Governor's desk.
Because of the dysfunction in the Senate, the most likely scenario is that we'd bring SB132 through the House and endure one more round of fact-free grandstanding from the House's neo-prohibitionists crying about how "child-killing, family-destroying, high-alcohol beer" is about to be legal and WON'T SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN? In other words, a repeat of exactly what we just endured yesterday, but with even more passionate pleading using bogus statistics made up on the spot.
And that would probably fall somewhere in mid-to-late April. Only then will we be poised to get the Governor's signature.
Another possible (though less likely) scenario is that we pass SB132 in the Senate next week, then a few weeks later bring HB373 to the floor in the Senate, still getting a double dose of grandstanding by Senate opponents. Or, we could skip SB132 altogether and just bring HB373 to the floor in the Senate in late April. But that's risky because the Senate might be locked up over budget battles.
And the final conceivable scenario is that the Senate skips over SB132 next week, goes on Spring Break the following week, then sometime shortly thereafter puts SB132 on their special order calendar. And once it has passed the BIR, our sponsor could move to substitute SB132 with HB373 because they are identical and HB373 could then receive a vote on final passage in the Senate. Then to the Governor's desk in late March or early April.
But as appealing as that shortcut sounds, it is very, very unlikely to become reality because the substitution of one bill for another for final passage would require unanimous consent from every Senator in the chamber. And while we're pretty confident we have enough support in the Senate to pass our bill, we do have opponents in the Senate and it's hard to imagine none of them objecting to unanimous consent on a motion that would fast-track our bill to final passage in both houses of the legislature.
See? I said it was complicated.
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I would past the URL to the YouTube clip if I could. :)