"Point of Order"--4/6/17

Hey everyone! Today was an exciting day at the legislature, and I'll walk you through my whole day at the floor. The Senate and the House were hearing exact bills about expanding the state voucher program, and by the time I arrived this morning there were already protests (which is actually pretty common at this point). But anyways, state vouchers were tools used by the state to fund the education of children who are disabled, children of veterans, etc. should they choose to switch from public to charter or private schools (basically covering the difference). This new law originally would have expanded that program so that all student would have been able to receive state money to switch to  whatever school they wanted to go to. Proponents argue that it increases school choice, meaning it provides greater access to all of the schools in Arizona to all of the students in the state, especially for those low-income families who are unable to afford to go to these schools. Opponents argue that the bill is a misuse of tax dollars and will spiral out of control, and will also take a lot of money away from the public schools that already are strapped for cash. Furthermore, the opposition argues that the vouchers won't end up helping the truly low-income families and will only benefit more middle-class families.

Anyways, the floor session began extremely empty, as House Democrats were running in from a meeting (which I assume was about how to stop the bill from passing), and later left to go coordinate with their peers in the Senate who were also trying to figure out the same thing. Eventually Rep. Espinoza (who is a Democrat) called a point of order where the Speaker eventually called upon a rule to require people to be on the floor, forcing the Democrats to come back (which is the quote! I chose it because I still don't understand why the Democrat was the one to call all of his fellow members back, please comment with all of your crazy conspiracy theories). Meanwhile, all the protesters had filed into the gallery (one tried to convince me to join their cause) and were waiting as the House went through all of the noncontroversial bills first, until they got bored and went down to watch the debate in the Senate. All of this was made more crazy by the fact that that same morning a strike-everything amendment was introduced, meaning everything that they had studied about the original bill was somewhat disregarded as the new bill was (while not completely, still somewhat) different. I couldn't find a good summary or fact sheet on it, so to be honest I'm still a little confused about what the amendment was. And apparently, it took the Democrats a while to figure it out too, because you could see the Democratic staff walking around the floor and handing their members questions to ask for their debate to try to slow this down. Meanwhile, in the Senate, someone introduced an amendment to the strike-everything amendment, and the members over there were debating whether to adopt that one or not. Therefore, the House was trying their best to slow everything down, asking millions of questions to Rep. Allen (the sponsor, but really Sen. Lesko wrote the bill) in an attempt to get the Senate to approve that amendment so they could incorporate it into the final bill. Meanwhile, Republican representatives were walking in and out of the floor with the speaker and the whip, as apparently they were trying to secure all of the votes necessary. This is also why the session took the whole day, but I digress.

Anyways, they finally decided to vote on the strike-everything (they still hadn't moved onto the actual bill), and but the Democrats were a few votes short of preventing it from passing(some Republicans actually flipped and voted against it, but not enough) Similarly, the bill moved forward. Although this wasn't the official vote to send it to the governor (second read, not third, remember?), the battle was pretty much over, and it is likely to become law (unless someone finds it unconstitutional, but they run every bill through the House Rules Committee, where a bunch of lawyers talk that one out).

So maybe you didn't find that as wild as I did, so here is a picture of a cute duck for reading all of this because I'm starting to feel the competition from Trey's blog:

is this duck cuter than pebbles? 

(Also sorry for all the parenthesis, I know it's all over the place. I also understand the irony of me saying this in parenthesis, but whatever. See you next week!)