The last two days have been very busy. Both bodies have
debated and passed their own budgets. This is done during a very long day of
floor debate. The members of the House and Senate debated specific lines in the
budget while also trying to add new amendments that were not included in the
budgets drafted by each body’s money committee. The House and Senate debated
their budget bills for hours and hours.
As you can imagine, after all that work,
both the House and Senate believe that they have the best approach to the
2020-2022 biennial budget. However, the legislative process requires that all
bills cross over to the other body for consideration. The House budget was
rejected by the Senate because they prefer their budget. Same thing happened in
the House. That leads to two budget bills with differences.
In the General
Assembly that means there needs to be a group assembled to work out a
compromise. This process is called conference. The Speaker in the House and the
Majority leader in the Senate choose the legislators who serve on the committee
of conference. Budget conferees will decide the funding priorities for the
biennial budget. They are very powerful in this process. All communication about
our needs and requests need to now go directly to the conferees. Here they are:
From the House: Delegates Torian, Sickles, Carr, Bulova,
Tyler, Cox, and Knight
From the VA Senate: Senators: Howell, Saslaw, Norment,
Hanger, Lucas, Barker, and Locke
We will see the budget conference next week ahead of
expected adjournment on Saturday, March 7.
All eyes really go towards budget,
but there is still much work to do with many other bills. My good friends
Delegate Lashrecse Aird and Delegate Marcia Price, for the last three session,
have taken advantage of quiet times on the House floor and have gone live on Facebook
with really informative videos. They generally do these videos when the House
is at recess or “at ease” and taking a quick break. They call their
installments “At Ease.” Last night’s At Ease does a really good job explaining what is happening in these last few days of session. You need to be able to log
into Facebook to see the video, but it is worth the 10 minutes for the lesson.
