Democratic leaders in Virginia’s House of Delegates proposed a measure on Tuesday to extend vote-recording requirements to subcommittees, a measure they say will prevent legislators from anonymously killing a bill at one of its earliest stages.
The proposal would end the two-year-old practice of allowing subcommittee votes to take place without any record of each member’s decision. House Democratic Caucus Chairman Brian Moran, D-Arlington, said the change would “require accountability” among his colleagues.
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“We have hundreds of bills that come before us,” he said. “We’ve been able to handle those bills over the years in a democratic way with accountability. It’s only the last two years that we’ve closed the process to accountability, and that’s what we’re asking to change.”
Subcommittees are an integral part of the legislature’s committee system, which determines what bills make it to the house floor, providing a way to whittle down the mountain of legislation introduced each session.
In the 2006 session, 491 bills died in House subcommittees without a recorded vote, and 225 bills carried over from that session met a similar fate when their committees did not act on them the following December, according to Bruce Jamerson, clerk of the House of Delegates. In the 2007 session, he said about 650 bills died in the subcommittees.
House Majority Leader Morgan Griffith, R-Salem, dismissed the Democratic proposal as election year antics, arguing the policy of not recording subcommittee votes was only put in place to codify a long-standing practice. The Democrats, he said, never mandated the stricter vote recording when they had the majority.
And with at least two Democrats on every committee, he said members can still propose to bring a bill that died in subcommittee up for debate in the full committee.
“The chairman doesn’t have to bring up every single bill, particularly if a subcommittee has defeated it,” Griffith said. “But if someone on the subcommittee is interested, he can get a vote.”
