The omnibus education bill proposed by House Republicans and favored by Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy failed to clear a procedural hurdle on Monday, throwing the fate of the sprawling and largely unvetted legislation into question.
The House was set to begin the amendment process on Senate Bill 140, legislation that originally dealt with internet upgrades for remote schools but had picked up a Christmas tree’s worth of Republican add-ons like a charter school expansion, increased home school funding and the governor’s controversial teacher bonus program. Before they could get to the first amendment, however, the House needed to adopt the working version of the bill.
Such a vote is typically not controversial or remarkable, but in a stinging rebuke of the House Republicans’ plans for the bill, the vote failed on a split 20-20.
The House Majority’s 20 Republican members voted for advancing the omnibus, but every other member of the House — the 16 members of the Minority, the three non-Republicans in the Majority, and the caucus-less far-right Rep. David Eastman — voted against it.
Rep. Bryce Edgmon, I-Dillingham, was one of the three non-Republican members of the House Majority to vote against the measure. He said he didn’t know how he was going to vote on the measure, but after soul-searching and talking with his fellow rural members, he decided he couldn’t support something with so many unanswered questions.
“I want a better process,” he said, noting that he had sat through the Rules Committee’s lone hearing on the bill. “It was not a full vetting of any of the measures … That’s not good legislation. It’s not a good process. My district sent me down here to defend my small schools.”
Republicans were quick to cry foul over the failed vote, threatening that this version of the bill is the only and last vehicle to institute any education policy changes this session. If their favored provisions don’t get to advance, they argued, then nothing else from the underlying legislation would.
“We have basically sent a message to the education community that we don’t care,” said House Rules Committee Chair Rep. Craig Johnson, the Anchorage Republican who devised the omnibus bill, of the vote while demanding that they revote. “The high-speed internet (grants) is key to many people in this room. The no vote on the CS is a no vote on internet for children in rural Alaska.”
That would be a reference to the underlying legislation that everything else was stapled onto. Senate Bill 140 was — and still is — about delivering a law change necessary to access federal grants for internet upgrades for remote schools. There is a looming deadline for that program, but there’s nothing stopping the Legislature from advancing that in a standalone bill … except for House Republicans like Johnson.
“You can complain about process all you want,” Johnson said. “The process is what it is, and it’s been done many times before.”
Several other Republicans — many of whom have spent of much of the session questioning the need for an increase to education funding — similarly complained that the move would kill any efforts to institute education changes or funding increases this session.
But none of it was convincing.
The 20 no votes held strong, arguing the options weren’t as narrow as the Republicans had suggested.
“This bill has been in the possession of the Rules chairman for weeks,” said Minority Leader Rep. Calvin Schrage, I-Anchorage, during the debate. “For weeks, we were told this bill would be on the floor, and for weeks we have waited. I have spoken to this, and members of the body have spoken to this, where has the bill been? Instead, we were given a false deadline, a Frankenstein’s monster of a bill. We’re told this is your opportunity if you care about education, this is your only shot.”
He noted that the procedural vote on adopting the bill still left the older versions of the bill in play. There is the House Finance Committee version that covers the internet upgrades and includes an increase to the base student allocation, and there is the Senate version that is just the internet upgrades and some other minor funding pieces.
Schrage said the House Majority’s demands boiled down to: “Accept our monster or screw education.”
Even Rep. Eastman argued that it was wiser to return to the previous versions of the bill, noting that the logrolling done by the House Majority violated the Legislature’s rules requiring bills to stay focused. He said it was a more transparent process. If the House were to advance the bill on a 21-vote margin, it would still need to corral the two-thirds vote necessary for a title change to abide by that rule.
When the threatening speeches didn’t seem to be getting anywhere, the House took an hour-long lunch break that extended to 5 p.m. when they returned only to gavel out for the night with plans to continue talking.
The House is set to resume its floor session at 11 a.m. today.
Matt Acuña Buxton is a long-time political reporter who has written for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner and The Midnight Sun political blog. He also authors the daily politics newsletter, The Alaska Memo, and can frequently be found live-tweeting public meetings on Twitter.