House Courts of Justice Civil Law subcommittee meeting.

I’ve written about floor sessions, and I’ve written about committee meetings, but I have never written about subcommittee meetings.

Subcommittees have suddenly and alarmingly become powerful tools this session. The House has changed the rules to allow subcommittees to kill bills on an unrecorded vote. (Technically-speaking they’re merely recommending that the committee kill the bill, but the end result is the same.) Bob Gibson recently explained this rule change in the Progress, joining the overwhelming majority of journalists who have weighed in against it.

It strikes me as particularly important for citizens to sit in on and publicly report o subcommittee meetings now, such that there will be some record of particularly egregious bill-killings. I’m disappointed to have no spent more time in subcommittee meetings this session, so I’m trying to make up for that at the tail of the GA session.

Subcommittee meetings are, in my limited experience, messy. Consider the House Courts of Justice Subcommittee Civil Law subcommittee meeting, which I attended at 2pm this afternoon. It was held in a small room, with a table at the front and a few dozen seats for spectators. Chairs lined three walls and filled the back half of the room. Delegates sat around the ten-person table, with Del. Terry Kilgore (R-Gate City) presiding, sitting at the middle of the table and facing the audience.

When the meeting began, I could scarcely believe that it had, in fact, begun. The audience at committee meetings is generally pretty quiet — not so at this subcommittee meeting. “Cacophonous” comes to mind. The two dozen audience members spoke on the phone, talked to one another, talked to delegates on the subcommittee. Traffic flowed freely in and out of the room. It was difficult to make out what the delegates were saying, despite that they were sitting just ten feet from me. Things calmed down after about ten minutes, but that was only a product of time — at no point did Del. Kilgore or anybody else demand quiet or shush the room.

On at least a couple of occasions, Del. Kilgore asked what particularly interest groups thought of a bill, and looked at (presumably) familiar faces in the audience for an indicator or support or opposition. In one instance, he asked if the bill was “OK with the trial lawyers,” and looked at the woman next to me, who wobbled her hand in the air uncertainly and said that it was as good as it would get. The bill passed within seconds.

Work is stop-and-go. The bills’ sponsors have to make their way around subcommittee meetings to speak on behalf of their various bills, which led to a delay of a few minutes while the subcommittee waited for Senator Fred Quayle (R-Chesapeake) to show up. The hurried pace became relaxed. Del. Kilgore borrowed some car keys (“it’s an American made product, a Ford truck,” declared the owner of the keys, “made in Norfolk, Virginia”) and used them to pry open one of the white-labelled tins of Virginia peanuts that are so ubiquitous around the capitol.

When Sen. Quayle did come in, things moved pretty quickly. He was speaking on behalf of several bills pertaining to child support. As the four bills ticked by, Del. Kilgore kept tally of the successes, telling Sen. Quayle that he was “two for two,” or “three for three” — “if you were a baseball player, you’d be making a million.”

An interesting exchange took place over SB220 (“Child support; revises guidelines for monthly obligations.”) The purpose of the bill is to modify the schedule that regulates how much parents pay in child support to make sure that it reflects the current realities of income and cost inflation, and was recommended by the Virginia Guideline Review Panel. Just one lobbyist expressed great opposition to the bill, saying that it would put Virginia at the top of the nation in child support. (Del. Kilgore glibly declared that we want to be at the top of the nation.) He said that his interest is in the children and, without breaking stride, that this bill would make his daughter want more money for a trip to Greece, which isn’t fair to him. Del. David Toscano (D-Charlottesville) spoke up at this. He had done math on how child support is divided up between parents in different income brackets, and stepped through his logic of the effect of the bill, seeking to understand the opposition. The discussion turned to the specifics of the formulae; because I lacked a copy of the paperwork that they were looking at, it didn’t mean much to me. So I was taken unawares by a motion to table the bill, effectively halting it. The “ayes” and the “noes” sounded about the same to me. Del. Kilgore declared the vote to be 4-4, and the motion passed. (My ignorance of the rules prevents me from understanding how a 4-4 vote means that the motion passed.)

The meeting ended shortly thereafter, and I had to scratch my head over what had just taken place. A Republican member of the subcommittee explained to me that it was simply a bad bill — that, under the proposal, poor kids would get less and rich kids would get more. Looking at the text of the bill, this seems to be so, but the difference is minimal. The drop in obligated support in the lowest income bracket is just a few dollars — I can’t find any instances of it dropping by more than $8/month. It’s generally closer to $5. And, as the lobbyist opposed to the bill said, some of the costs of living (as a percentage of all expenditures) have gone down in the past few decades, so I can only assume that this minor drop for the poor and increase for the wealthy is commensurate with that. A Democratic member of the subcommittee explained to me that the bill being tabled doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s dead — a member of the subcommittee could report it to the committee and bring it back to life, as may happen with this bill.

The meeting was relaxed but fast-moving, informal but formal. I did not feel out of place in the audience, and I don’t think I would have felt awkward had I felt moved to testify on behalf of or in opposition to a particular piece of legislation. Anybody with the time and the inclination to attend subcommittee meetings and document the proceedings should have nothing to fear. Subcommittee meetings might be clubby, but the club seems to accept just about anybody. Even, apparently, me.