Bills passed by the House and Senate but may never get to the governor

The state government nerds in town can’t wait to see what happens with this one.

If you remember your middle school civics class (or “Schoolhouse Rock”), a bill must pass the House and the Senate before it goes to the governor for a signature to become law. (“I’m just a bill, yes I’m only a bill.”)

But there’s a little more to the bill-becomes-a-law story.

Once a bill passes the House and Senate, it returns to the House, where the Clerk’s Office does a final proofread and reference check before it’s presented to the governor. This process is called the enrollment process.

When the House is in session and the Clerk’s Office flags an issue, the House can bring the bill back procedurally, fix the errors through amendments and another round of voting and send it back to the clerk for enrollment and presentation to the governor.

For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, the former Democratic Speaker Joe Tate-led House couldn’t get all 118 bills that the Senate passed by Dec. 20 to the governor by the time the Legislature formally adjourned Dec. 31.

That’s not necessarily catastrophic. The House clerk is still on staff and is expected to continue with the administrative process. Of course, if the bills contain errors, there’s no way to fix them. In those cases, the governor will veto or sign the bills with the expectation that the next Legislature will fix them.

What is new territory is for the bills not to be presented to the governor when the next Legislature gavels into session on the second Wednesday of January, as the Constitution requires.

That’s what happened a couple of weeks ago.

New Republican House Speaker Matt Hall took office and was told there were still nine bills left over from the previous Legislature that were still in the Clerk’s Office waiting to be processed. What would he like to do with them?

The bills include:

• Giving local government and school employee unions more power to negotiate how much an employer pays for their employees’ health insurance. Currently, the law sets firm limits on this.
• Allowing state corrections and conservation officers to join the Michigan State Police’s pension system.
• Allowing Oakland and Wayne counties’ voters to raise a new mileage tax for the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History and the Detroit Historical Society.
• Protecting more assets from poor people with their wages garnished to settle a debt.

Hall asked the clerk to sit on the bills while his new staff’s legal eagles figured out what to do.

The answer isn’t as clear-cut as you might think.

Our team at MIRS spent an afternoon digging through House journals and found that this happened last in 1980, just before the start of the 1981 session.

At that time, the speaker and the governor going from one session to the next were the same. It was Democratic House Speaker Bobby Crim and Gov. Bill Milliken. 

A former staffer from the time, Bruce Timmons, said that while the bills were sent, it was unclear whether they had to be sent.

The Constitution and state law aren’t clear.  For one thing, the Constitution says once a session of the Legislature ends, that’s it. It’s done until it gavels into session again in the next calendar year.

Also, one Legislature can’t mandate that a successor Legislature do anything.

However, one could argue that enrolling and presenting bills to the governor are ministerial functions that complete the process of the prior Legislature.

Meanwhile, the Republicans didn’t support any of these bills. If the bills die on the vine, that’s quite fine with them.

Democrats and the labor unions who pushed for the pension and public employee health care bills are hopping mad. They feel like Hall is playing games. 

But Republicans bring up a good point. Had the Dems just passed bills at a pace the clerk could keep up with, they wouldn’t be in this mess.

(Kyle Melinn is the editor of the Capitol news service MIRS. You can email him at melinnky@gmail.com.)