MOScout Daily Update: Special Session to Start September 6? - More Special Session Talk - MOIndy on Marijuana IP and more...

Special Session Talk

According to a press advisory, Governor Mike Parson will announce “announce details regarding the upcoming special session on the extension of key agricultural tax credits and permanent income tax relief” today at a 2PM press conference.

Here’s what folks in the building are saying ahead of the official announcement…

·       The expectation is for the special session to begin after Labor Day, the week before Veto Session.  They’re looking at a start of Tuesday September 6.

·       But that start could be a slow roll with the legislation introduced and working through the committee process.  One Senate side source says that they would start the process, but I’m also told that Pro Tem Dave Schatz isn’t available that week.  Another source says that the “House wants to ‘go first.’” We’ll see.

·       After the call is made – presumably this afternoon – we’ll see if the House and Senate can come up with a basic framework. 

·       Additionally, the two bodies may have different ideas about cutting taxes.  One House source says that Parson told the Republican Caucus he wants to increase the standard deduction, remove the bottom tax bracket and fully implement the state incomes tax cut to 4.8%.  The fiscal note for that would run about $700M, but this source says that uber-donor “Rex Sinquefield and many in the House want bigger cut.”

·       The conventional wisdom is that the House would be likely more aggressive on the size of the cut.  But also, there could be some difference in approach – some in the House are interested in looking at cutting corporate taxes, while some in the Senate have focused on personal property taxes in the past.

·       And of course, there’s also the Ag tax credits.  Everyone seems on board with the credits themselves as they passed during session. But there’s clearly some heartburn about extending them 6 years when the general accepted framework of tax credits is to keep them on a tighter leash so you can evaluation their effectiveness and adjust them.

·       One denizen says, “Staying focused on fixing the two issues from regular session and taking up new tax code changes and rural job development in January is the big challenge.”  See more about the legislature’s flexibility in dealing with the scope and details of the governor’s call below…

How Much Flex?

We’ll see how much detail is in the governor’s special session call.  There’s often some debate about how much leeway the legislature has in handling the governor’s call.  Often legislators will claim the “co-equal branches” of government argument to say that they can pretty much pass whatever they want once they’re called into session.  Meanwhile the third floor may assert a more powerful executive branch which essentially dictates what the bill will look like.

I’ve uploaded a good backgrounder on this here.  It’s a memo to the Democratic House Caucus from 2013, written by Marc Powers, outlining court rulings on the issue.

From the memo…

The Supreme Court’s cases on this subject established the following points:

• The constitutional constraint on the General Assembly to act only on subjects authorized by the governor during special session is mandatory, not discretionary.

• If the General Assembly passes legislation that is beyond the scope of the governor’s call, the fact that the governor signs it into law doesn’t cure the deficiency, and the legislation is still unconstitutional.

• The governor may only restrict the General Assembly to the subjects he puts before it and cannot specify the details by which lawmakers address those subjects. To the extent the governor’s call attempts to dictate the details of legislation, such details are merely advisory, and the General Assembly need not adhere to them.

• Although the governor may dictate only the subject, and not the details, of legislation, the court typically has construed authorized subjects so narrowly as to rule legislation unconstitutional for containing provisions that are logically related to and supportive of those subjects, but not specifically mentioned in the call. In one instance, the court even declared unconstitutional a bill that made two changes to a single existing statute because the governor’s special session call authorized only one of those changes.

MOIndy on Marijuana IP

Missouri Independent’s Tessa Weinberg is out with an interesting behind the scenes look at Legal Missouri’s final push to make the ballot.  Read it here.

·       In a span of a little over two weeks, an initiative petition to legalize recreational marijuana in Missouri made an unexpected comeback.  In late July, unofficial tallies showed the Legal Missouri campaign 2,275 signatures short of the threshold for getting on the ballot, leading many to believe its hopes were dashed.  By Aug. 9, the deficit was gone, and Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft announced he had certified the marijuana petition to appear on the November ballot. During that window, the campaign behind the initiative petition deployed a novel strategy.

·       Instead of waiting for certification and turning to the courts, as outlined in state law, it asked the Secretary of State’s Office to do its own review of signatures. The campaign even provided a list of signatures it felt were incorrectly disqualified…

·       “I don’t recall a time when there were corrections like this that were done outside of the court process,” said Chuck Hatfield, an attorney who has represented numerous initiative petition campaigns over the years…

·       Most who were interviewed by The Independent about the success of Legal Missouri’s strategy said they believe the ultimate outcome was correct. The campaign collected enough signatures, and thus, deserves to be on the November ballot. But even those who agree with the outcome say the process wasn’t transparent and risks undermining confidence in the system…

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