Special session stalls after Senate vote
By Staff
from staff and wire reports
May 28, 2004
A special legislative session stalled Thursday after the state Senate refused to negotiate on a civil justice reform bill and leaders of the state House and Senate blamed each other for the breakdown.
The move threatened to doom the special session that began last week when Gov. Haley Barbour called lawmakers back to Jackson to consider civil justice reform and voter identification.
Talks over a compromise voter ID bill also have stalled.
The House voted 60-59 Thursday morning to negotiate with the Senate on a compromise civil justice reform bill. Hours later, the Senate refused by voice vote to enter talks; senators did not take a roll call vote.
Senate leaders said lawmakers could spend weeks negotiating a compromise, only to see a final bill killed on a technical point when it returned to the full House for consideration.
Leaders say they could debate a new bill soon. But it is unclear if work will begin today or after the Memorial Day weekend.
Questionable bill
Earlier Thursday, Barbour said holding negotiations on a bill with technical problems would be like hiring the best surgeon in the world to come operate on a dead person.''
Lt. Gov. Amy Tuck, who presides over the state Senate and serves as that body's president, said negotiations on a compromise bill would be a waste of taxpayers' money.
The bill in question originated in the House and didn't include parts of state law dealing with capping damage awards or protecting innocent sellers'' of defective products.
The Senate added those parts early this week.
But, the House has strict rules against adding new parts of state law to a bill. If any member objects to the addition, the House speaker could rule that the bill is improperly before the House which would kill the bill.
Asked Thursday how he would rule if any House member raised technical questions, McCoy said: A lot of presumptions are there, and I would not want to get into that.''
McCoy reacts
McCoy, serving in his first term as speaker of the 122-member House, said he had told Barbour that the three House negotiators assigned to a conference committee would have been free to consider all issues.
We resent the governor or the Senate leadership predicting how the House would react to a product that our conferees agree to,'' McCoy said.
Barbour says he wants a bill that includes caps on pain-and-suffering damages and features to protect innocent sellers'' of products.
The bill on which the House invited negotiations included a $500,000 limit for pain-and-suffering awards in medical malpractice cases and $1 million limit for lawsuits against businesses.
If the House accepted the bill as it was and did not invite negotiations on a compromise, the special session likely would have come a swift close. Instead, it enters its eighth day on Friday.
By returning to the Capitol on Thursday, each lawmaker lost $1,500 in monthly expense money they would have received had they not been meeting in special session. The loss saved the state $261,000.
Legislators' pay
Lawmakers earn a $10,000 annual salary. In addition, they pocket $75 a day in pay for attending special sessions as well as $86 a day for expenses while attending special sessions.
Each day of a special session costs a total of $33,915, said Senate secretary John Gilbert, a certified public accountant. Once a week, legislators are paid for a round trip between their homes and the Capitol.
Those days cost $49,336.
Through Thursday, the special session had cost $268,247. With legislators' loss of out-of-session expenses, the net cost of the session was $7,247.
Barbour originally had two agenda items in the session that started last week: civil justice changes and voter identification. Talks over a voter ID bill have stalled.
Barbour says he might expand the special session agenda to let lawmakers extend the life of the Department of Human Services beyond the June 30 end of the fiscal year.
