Posted by Jon Fleischman at 12:00 am on Feb 08, 2009 Comments Off on Applying Some Sophistication To Budget Deal Voting
It is my hope that Republican legislators will apply the same
degree of sophistication to their approach on voting on a Big
5-agreed-upon "deal" that those of us on the outside will use to
analyze the proposal and the votes on all of its component
parts.
First and foremost, since not all FlashReport readers are
intimately aware of how these budget votes tend to take place — it
is not one bill, but series of bills all tied together that make
the budget "package" deal. So what happens is that one bill
may lay out modifications to state spending, another bill might
contain tax increases, and other bills may contain other
miscellaneous parts of the package.
Knowing that a deal is carved up this way is important in
analyzing who supports the package — because, and this is critical,
for ANY PART of the package to be enacted, it ALL must be
enacted. This is the manner in which the Democrats can ensure
their any votes they put up for spending CUTS don’t go into effect
unless Republicans put up the necessary votes for TAX INCREASES —
or visa versa I suppose.
I lay all of this out because it is being reported in the
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