NEWS

LoBianco: Another legislative session, full of surprises

Tom LoBianco
tom.lobianco@indystar.com
The seal of the state of Indiana  hangs on the wall at the front of the House of Representatives chambers at the Indiana Statehouse.

In just a few days, state lawmakers and Gov. Mike Pence will wrap up their 2015 session, and the element of surprise has taken on sudden importance. Who's being blindsided typically determines whether those surprises make it into law.

Republican leaders who have long pushed to remove Democratic Superintendent of Public Instruction Glenda Ritz as chair of the State Board of Education added a possible wrinkle late last week that could move control of federal education dollars from Ritz to Pence. The expansion of the power battle between Pence and Ritz comes with just a few days left in the session and with very little public debate.

But a move from one Indianapolis Republican to improve lawmaker ethics and transparency ran aground last week after the top Republican in the House was caught off-guard.

Sen. Brent Waltz, R-Indianapolis, added a measure that would require lawmakers who own $500,000 or more in a company to disclose their ownership. If the measure had been in place last year, it would have exposed then-House Speaker Pro Tem Eric Turner, whose secret work to protect his family's earnings led to this year's sweeping ethics debate that now has all lawmakers (and state employees) facing tougher rules.

House Speaker Brian Bosma, R-Indianapolis, slammed on the brakes: "I didn't object to it necessarily," he said, "but just wanted to have the option to take a hard look and revise if necessary."

The last few days of any legislative session are always wild and woolly affairs, with the ability to slip big new changes into legislation in conference committees, avoiding much of the public debate (and private lobbying) that would otherwise trip them up.

Sen. Jean Leising, R-Oldenburg, has long championed legislation that would require schools to continue teaching cursive handwriting, in the face of sweeping technological changes that have touched the classroom. The proposal stalls just about every year in the House, and this year it was added to an education bill just a few weeks ago in the Senate. Then it was ripped out by the House education chairman, dead for another year.

No surprise there.

Then came a proposal from Rep. Terry Goodin, D-Crothersville, to mandate drug testing for all welfare recipients. The proposal, which has failed in previous sessions because of constitutionality concerns, was withdrawn by Goodin last week. (When it comes to the element of surprise on this issue, Rep. Ryan Dvorak, D-South Bend, still holds the title. In 2012, he decided that if residents seeking government money should undergo drug testing, then state lawmakers collecting a paycheck from the state should be subjected to the same testing. The change narrowly made it into the measure, amid confusion in the House at being caught off-guard by such an argument.)

Or take the decision to "pause" the state's adoption of Common Core in 2013 — one year before lawmakers and Pence decided to exit the national testing program altogether. The issue was so complex, and whipped together so quickly in the final hours of the 2013 session, that legislators had trouble understanding (and explaining) exactly what they had just done.

Surprises are all about timing, of course, and Indiana's state lawmakers have proved again this year that mere hours can seem like a lifetime and months can appear to be no time at all.

Take the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which brought a firestorm to Indiana unlike any the state has seen in recent years. The proposal was debated extensively in the General Assembly and Indiana media in the months after the session started but still appeared to catch opponents off-guard.

But once the national firestorm had engulfed the Statehouse, it took just a few days of breakneck, closed-door negotiations to come up with a "fix".

The fix was unveiled publicly at 9 a.m. April 2 and signed into law about eight hours later. There was very little public debate over the merits of the change itself.

But calls to add lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people as a protected class of citizens — a move that would have mollified the state's most vociferous critics — were dismissed out of hand because the issue had not been publicly vetted.

So what surprises do lawmakers have in store for the final three days of the 2015 session? Plenty. We just don't know them yet.

Call Star reporter Tom LoBianco at (317) 444-7136. Follow him on Twitter: @tomlobianco.