For those wondering how the abuser fees bill passed unnoticed, consider the text of the bill. It weighs in at 41,017 words. The bill has been viewed 1,315 times on Richmond Sunlight, but had just one comment, from somebody wondering whether there’s a record for the longest bill ever introduced.
So, fine, the bill is of a length overwhelmed mere mortals, but what about the bill summary, the paragraph accompanying every bill to explain its content in plain English? It reads:
Transportation funding and reform. Provides (i) statewide funding of transportation projects through current funds and additional funds, (ii) authority to localities in Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads to impose additional fees for transportation, and (iii) several administrative and efficiency reforms impacting transportation. The bill also authorizes the Commonwealth Transportation Board to issue bonds in an aggregate amount not to exceed $2 billion for statewide transportation funding.
There’s not a word about abuser fees. This is a perfect example of the all-too-common phenomenon of bill summaries that don’t adequately summarize the bill. A bill with more than 41,000 words in it surely deserves a bill summary that’s more than a paragraph. The Marshall-Newman Amendment banning gay marriage was 308 words long, while the summary was 101 words long, or 33% of the length of the bill. By that standard, the abuser fees bill summary should be 13,565 words long. If that seems a little excessive, then perhaps 1% would be better — 410 words. That would be six times longer than the summary that was provided.
Legislative summaries aren’t written so that the public can figure out what each bill does without reading it in full. The summaries aren’t written so legislators can, either. The legislative summary is only there to refresh the recollection of someone who has read the bill or to introduce the general theme of the bill to someone who hasn’t read its details, so that the people can remember what a bill, referred to only by number, does in general. While a legislative summary may not be comprehensive it is certainly more useful to legislators, and the public, than having nothing between the bill number and the text of the bill. Whether you’re a legislator or a citizen, if you’re looking at or tracking several, dozens, or hundreds of bills a year, it’s difficult to remember that HB3202 deals with transportation at all, compared to all the other bills introduced that session. The summary helps make the correlation between bill number and subject.
The legislative summary is never considered part of the bill and cannot be used to determine legislative intent. Both are prohibited by statute. The legislative summary doesn’t change over the life of the bill, either; as the bill is amended, the summary doesn’t change.
When you counted the number of words in this bill, did you only count the words the bill actually changed? Or did you include in your count all the words that the bill had to recite in order to get to the changes? Not all bills are equal in that sense, because some bills only create new code sections; in those cases, all the words in the bill are changed words. However, a bill may only change one word in an existing section, even a section of several thousand words, and the bill would recite the entire section just to amend the particular word targeted by the bill.
Waldo, I agree with your criticism of the bill. But the problem with it runs deeper than simply an inadequate summary. An argument can be made that the bill violates the state constitutional requirement known as the “single object rule”: “No law shall embrace more than one object, which shall be expressed in its title. Nor shall any law be revived or amended with reference to its title, but the act revived or the section amended shall be reenacted and published at length.”
HB 3202 was an entire package of laws, encompassing a slew of measures including tax and fee increases, creation of regional transportation authorities, VDOT reform, devolution of authority from VDOT to local governments, and, of course, the infamous Abuser Fees.
Had the “single object rule” been obeyed, the Abuser Fees would have been treated as its own law, with its own title, description and legislative track record.
Phil Rodokanakis with the Virginia Club for Growth raised this very issue back in April. (See “Legislative Tyranny“.)
I think we can all agree that it’s not only impossible for a legislator to read all bills, but also for a member of the general public. By all practical standards, the summaries serve as a summary of the bill. (Hence the term.) One cannot expect that they’d capture every nuance of the bill, but they so routinely fail to adequately describe the crucial bits of the bill that it’s clearly a problem. Whether they’re doing what they were originally designed to do doesn’t much interest me — the problem is that they often fail to do what is expected of them, which is to summarize the bill in a way that’s meaningful to legislators and the public.
This would certainly seem to highlight one of the major problems with violating the single object rule — it’s impractical to summarize a bill that does so much. Far better to have dozens of little bills, each properly described. Perhaps the GA would want to bundle those together, for procedural reasons, and vote on them collectively. But best to keep them as discrete items, properly described, for the reasons that concern each of us.
And its own vote, so we know who agrees to what. Certainly an accountability item.
The abuser fee feature was well-noted in most in-depth analyses of the bill when it was being considered. But the constitutional issue raised at that time had to do with docking those with so many active “points” on their driving record, and whether this constituted an ex-post facto penalty change. The first argument I saw tied to the Equal Protection Clause (14th Amendment) re: exempting out-of-staters came from Del. Bob Marshall, the day after 3202 passed. Perhaps that is because that feature was added as an amendment by the governor after initial passage.