Sweeping the Board

We have 8 working days to go in our 45-day session. This afternoon in the House, we "swept the board," meaning that we moved all the bills on the third-reading calendar (meaning they were in the queue to be debated on the floor) back to the rules committee for "sifting." This is a bummer for those representatives whose bills were high on the calendar. They now need to lobby Rep. Becky Lockhart's Rules Committee, which will send bills to the third-reading calendar a few at a time.

UPDATE: Oh, I see that LaVarr Webb also wrote about sweeping the board at Utah Policy (but in a much more lucid manner than I did. Grrr!).

My first session up here, at about this point, I got chewed up in a committee. Mel Brown, one of the three former speakers who coincidentally picked that day to tell me I was doing a great job (because good stories travel fast, and all three knew I had just been kicked), took me off the hill for lunch (so I could lick my wounds in private). He asked, "Do you know why the legislature puts off all the hard issues to the end?"

I confessed I didn't and asked him, "Why?," needing some nugget of wisdom.

"Because it can't put them off any longer."

That's one of the smartest things I've ever heard. We have tough decisions to make, and now is when we have to finish making them.

We made a couple of tough decisions today -- passing Rep. Ferrin's tuition tax credits bill out of the education committee and not passing Rep. Litvack's hate crime bill out of committee. These are hard decisions that would leave members of the public with hard feelings, no matter which way we went. There is still a lot of process left for both issues, and I would encourage the public to sound off on both important issues.