For more than a decade, Rep. John Blust, R-Guilford, has been considered a stickler for rules. As he prepares to begin his seventh term in the General Assembly — and his sixth in the House — Blust hopes that the new Republican majority in Raleigh will be more sympathetic to his ongoing campaign to bring more openness to legislative procedures.
Many legislative rules may seem innocuous — such as the dress code requiring coat and tie for male legislators and dignified dress for female lawmakers — but Blust says others can undermine the entire democratic process.
Among Blust’s top priorities are taking away some of the “arbitrary” powers of the speaker of the House, making sure popular bills aren’t “quietly killed” in committee, and ending the practice of hiding “substantive law changes” in the budget.
The first item on Blust’s agenda would allow the entire majority caucus to select committee chairmen. As it stands, the speaker appoints the chairs. This power, along with the speaker’s power to assign a bill to the committee of his choice, he says, gives “one man an inordinate say” in the destiny of a bill.
“If a special interest didn’t like a bill, [it] didn’t have to convince 61 not to vote for it,” Blust said. The speaker could kill the bill by assigning it to a committee where the chairman would never bring it up for a vote and it would die, he explained.
“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve asked a chairman, ‘Hey can you hear this bill?’ and I’ve been told, ‘You’ve got to go talk to the speaker. The speaker told me not to,’” Blust said. “I don’t think I’m elected to go down there and have to crawl to one person to get something done.”
Another proposed rule would force a committee to vote on any bill that demonstrated a certain level of support — “say, 30 co-sponsors,” Blust said. And another would allow a bill “killed” in committee to be brought to the House floor with 61 votes.
“I’ve seen bills that a thousand people [would] come down and march for never discussed,” Blust said. “All the members hide behind the committee chair or the speaker.”
“There are bills that would’ve passed overwhelmingly that the speaker didn’t want and he would just say ‘no, we’re not going to do that.’”
As examples, he pointed to the Castle Doctrine — which would let homeowners use lethal force to protect their residences from violent attack — and the “fetal homicide” bill, allowing the alleged killer of a pregnant woman to be charged with multiple homicides, which were referred to the House Judiciary I Committee and never came to a vote.
Another rule would prohibit “substantive” law changes from being inserted into the budget. Blust said these changes would never pass as separate legislation, and should not be tagged on to a lengthy bill everyone must eventually vote for.
Hunter Bacot, a political science professor from Elon University, doesn’t think Blust’s proposals will be “greeted with a lot of enthusiasm.”
Any time you try and strip power from the speaker of the House, he said, “you’re going to meet resistance.”
Bacot compared the speaker to a CEO, saying “someone needs to be in charge.”
There are 120 members in the House who could inundate the committees with bills if they wanted to, Bacot said. “You need a central clearing house” to sort out them out.
“Someone has to make those decisions and move forward,” Bacot said. “If you bring them before a caucus… you think it’s slow now? The more people that have their hands in the pot, the messier it will be.”
Blust’s proposal to force committees to vote on all meritorious bills “sounds good in theory,” Bacot added, “but the problem is you’d get a lot of people who’d introduce bills that they know would never see the light of day just so they could get members on the record as voting up or down on it, and then go use it against them in a campaign.”
While Bacot calls the move purely political, Blust sees nothing wrong with it. He thinks it’s good to get politicians’ positions on the record.
“I’ve even heard Republicans support this, saying, ‘We’ve got to be protected from votes.’ Well, you can be protected from votes by not running for office,” Blust said.
Becki Gray, vice president for outreach at the John Locke Foundation, says some of the most “egregious” rules were put in place by Republicans when they took control of the state House after the 1994 election.
Republicans enacted the “floater” rule, for example, allowing the speaker to appoint six or eight members who could “float” between committees.
“So whenever he didn’t have enough votes in a committee to do what he wanted to do, he could call in floaters for whatever reason,” Gray said. “If they needed three votes to get something passed all of a sudden three floaters came into the room, participated in the committee and voted the bill through.”
Former Democratic Speaker Jim Black took advantage of this rule when he couldn’t get a tax increase through the finance committee. Speaker Joe Hackney did away with the rule.
“I can’t tell you how many times Bill Owens, the [outgoing] Rules Committee chairman, has told me on the floor in front of people, when I’ve questioned him about something, ‘your people did this to us,’” Blust said. “My comment is always, ‘I wasn’t in the House then.’”
Blust said he’s pushed for rules reform for “a long time and if Republicans are going to get in there and say, ‘Hey, now that we’ve got it, we don’t have to do anything,’ then I say, a pox upon us.”
It’s easy for Republicans to think their speaker of the House and president pro tem of the Senate will be “far more benevolent than the Democrats, but I say let’s guarantee it,” Blust said. “We are a government of laws, not of men.”
“It’s a noble intent,” Bacot said, “but it will all be put to the test when they get down to July 20, everyone’s tired and moody, and the budget still hasn’t been passed.”
The House Republican caucus may take up Blust’s proposals as early as its next meeting, scheduled for Saturday.
Sara Burrows is an associate editor of Carolina Journal.