The 39th day of this year's legislative session – the one that was the setup for today's final, frenzied effort – was one of those that the denizens of the Golden Dome will be talking about for months, or maybe years.
For someone who doesn't work in the sausage factory of government, however, it isn't obvious what made the day so significant. It was more about the machinery, really, than the sausage.
The dramatic high point of this penultimate legislative day came on a Wednesday afternoon vote on SB 200, the organizational chunk of the giant transportation package making its way through the process like a baby goat passing through the digestive track of a python.
In a break with precedence, if not strictly the rules, House Speaker Glenn Richardson kept the voting machine on at least four minutes while lieutenants worked the floor and flipped five votes which had at first been cast against the measure. Richardson cast the deciding vote for passage, 91-84.
Hallway denizens, young and old, shook their heads in wonder, and asked aloud if anyone could remember such a thing. Which no one could, although Tom Murphy, in his record tenure as speaker, might have done something similar at least once.
To outsiders, it must seem that the real significance of all this legislative drama is that Richardson, Gov. Sonny Perdue and Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle are at last coalescing around a compromise state transportation strategy. Immediately after the House vote, the Senate named its conferees for the negotiations over the spending side of the package, and things on the surface at least seemed to be proceeding clickety-clack.
But it might not mean that at all. Wednesday's vote could be the harbinger of some grand compromise to be delivered up today, or the setup for another train wreck tonight. (That's if you consider leaving the DOT board as is to be a train wreck. Some don't.) This could be Richardson getting on board with the governor and lieutenant governor, or he could be as one lobbyist put it, "using the House as a fiddle to play Casey with."
By Wednesday evening, the Senate was in full dander over a comment in the House well by Rep. Carl Rogers (R-Gainesville), who was upset that one of his bills had been left off the Senate calendar, that he would not be a "Senate whore." This was the parting shot before the two chambers come back Friday to settle matters, and it doesn't forecast a peaceful 40th day.
The fate of the DOT bill won't be clear until after Cagle and Richardson have slammed down their gavels and shouted "sine die," and it's not what interested the insiders most about Wednesday's drama anyway. They're thinking about the legislative minefields they'll have to negotiate in the future, and what they were seeing was the rapid evolution of a new era of power politics.
In the way such things are usually scored, Richardson has won ugly in the last couple sessions, and with Perdue headed toward his portrait-hanging and Cagle leaving the Senate to run for governor, the speaker will likely be judged to have entrenched his power in this one. Watching him twist arms and hold the clock for a bill being carried for the governor by Rep. David Ralston (R-Blue Ridge), the legislator who tried to unseat him at the beginning of the session, one had to be impressed. He may not be winning any prettier, but Richardson has grown increasingly more sophisticated in the power game.
One notable thing about this 39th day, for lobbyists, staffers and the dwindling tribe of reporters at the Capitol, was the sheer amount of unfinished business still to be dealt with as the General Assembly steamed toward its Friday conclusion. Previous sessions have been brought to an unexpected halt before some important matters were settled, but never have so many cans been consciously kicked down the road: not only the huge transportation package but the bill – possibly the most politically explosive of the session – changing how cars are tax, the billboard right-of-way bill and several other measures with come-back-and-bite potential.
That's a dangerous tendency, when were talking about the decisions that will determine how people get back and forth to work every day and who's qualified to serve on their local school board. And it comes at a time when more and more power is being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands: those who appoint the bureaucrats ... and those who decide how long the voting machines stay on.
Tom Baxter is editor of the Southern Political Report and senior vice president of its parent company, InsiderAdvantage, a media and polling firm. He was the chief political correspondent at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution for 20 years.
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