New Legislature Will Develop A Budget and Make Laws

Details: 21 December 2012

The 103rd Nebraska Legislature will commence its first regular session on January 9 at 10 a.m. at the State Capitol in Lincoln. Forty-nine citizen legislators will participate in a public-policy process that will last for up to 90 legislative days, likely extending into early June. It is the longer of two regular sessions for this Legislature. A session of up to 60 legislative days will follow in 2014.

The 49-member Unicameral, unique among all the states, will include 11 members who were not part of the preceding Legislature and were elected to office as a result of the General Election on November 6. The new members are: Dan Watermeier from Syracuse, District 1; Bill Kintner from Papillion, District 2; Sara Howard, Omaha, District 9; Ernie Chambers, Omaha, District 11; Jim Scheer, Norfolk, District 19; Jerry Johnson, Wahoo, District 23; Kate Bolz, Lincoln, District 29; Rick Kolowski, Omaha, District 31; Al Davis, Hyannis, District 43; Sue Crawford, Bellevue, District 45; and John Murante from Gretna, District 49.

All but Kintner and Chambers are replacing incumbents who were prohibited from running for re-election a second time due to term limits prescribed by the Nebraska Constitution. Senators-Elect Kintner and Chambers defeated incumbents at the polls.

Fifteen incumbent legislators won re-election in November. The remaining 23 seats are held by legislators who have completed just half of their current four-year terms.

As anyone who follows the Legislature knows, Ernie Chambers presents a unique situation. He isn’t really a new legislator; not really a Senator-Elect. He brings with him 38 years of prior service in the Unicameral. He was term-limited at the end of 2008. He sat out four years as required by law. Then he won another election in November, becoming the first term-limited legislator to return.

On the new session’s first day, after participating in the pomp and ceremony, the 49 senators will elect their leadership for the next two years. Due primarily to term limits, several prominent positions are open, without incumbent leaders returning. These positions include Speaker of the Legislature and chairpersons of the following standing committees: Appropriations; Banking, Commerce and Insurance; Natural Resources; Revenue; and Transportation and Telecommunications.

In addition, the incumbent chairman of the Education Committee, Senator Greg Adams from York, has announced his intention of seeking to be chosen Speaker. If that happens, as is likely, then the Education Committee will need a new chairperson as well.

In the first year of a new Legislature, the foremost responsibility of the collective body is to develop the state’s spending plan, for the ensuing Biennium. In this situation, that’s the period of two fiscal years running from July 1, 2013 through June 30, 2015.

The budget-process starts in essence with the Governor submitting his program-by-program spending recommendations to the Legislature. The Appropriations Committee will spend the next 10 weeks or so pouring over the numbers and conducting public hearings. Ultimately, the committee will present its recommendations to the full Legislature. The package of budget bills will be subject to floor debate, amendments and votes. Once passed, the package will go back to the Governor for possible line-item vetoes and then back to the Legislature for potential veto overrides.

There will be many other issues throughout the 2013 session; some routine, some fairly controversial and some hotly contested. For instance, issues stemming from implementation of federal health-care-reforms are ripe for debate, such as expanding eligibility for Medicaid coverage. On the way toward requiring the states to cooperate in this, the federal law got tripped up by the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled that the federal government can’t make the states do it.

Having not a mandate, but the option, and quite a bit of incentive through a plan of considerably higher federal financial participation, should Nebraska do the expansion anyway? Is it the right thing to do? A showdown looms over the idea.

Regrettably, an effort is probably going to be made, urged on by the Governor, to repeal the fundamentally pro life and fiscally-prudent policy of providing medical-assistance coverage for prenatal care for the unborn children of impoverished pregnant women who are themselves ineligible due to unauthorized immigration status. The federal Children’s Health Insurance Program, which pays nearly three-fourths of the cost, considers an unborn child the same as any child in relation to eligibility.

Those whose opposition to this narrowly tailored but highly important medical coverage is based on the bogus claim that it is an immigration issue cannot defend such a harsh view of the unborn child. If the woman was not pregnant, there would be no need for prenatal care. It’s the pregnancy—the presence of the unborn child—that substantiates the policy. Thirty legislators did the right thing in enacting it over the Governor’s veto last year. Any effort to reverse that decision deserves no traction.

Another issue among many that will receive attention will be the Legislature’s response to the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that mandatory life-without-parole sentences for those under the age of 18 when they commit murder violate the U.S. Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.