First cross and the art of the gut and substitute

The first crossover deadline is this week, March 6. On this day, bills that have passed all three readings in each house will "cross over" to the other. Only those bills will be alive for the rest of the session, plus any carryover bills from last year that crossed-over last year. Remember, carryover bills are "sleeping," they can be revived at the same point in the process where they stopped moving the prior year.

It is not typical to move one of those carry-over bills; that will generally happen only when house B kills house A's crossed-over bill, and house A really wants that bill (I'll call it Bill 1). House A then can re-hear one of house B's bills from the last session that crossed over last year and then died in house A's committee (I'll call this Bill 2). In that hearing, house A will remove the original contents of the dead Bill 1 and put its language in the sleeping Bill 2. This procedure is known as "gut and substitute." If house A then passes the amended bill, it will cross over back to its original house, house B, as a Bill 2 shell with the Bill 1 contents.

Why bother? Won't house B just kill it again? Not necessarily. Bringing the bill back from the dead via gut and substitute is a serious sign from house A that it wants the bill. This is where votes get traded, and this is where you see why so many bills are given defective effective dates and blank appropriations. Now you have a sizeable pool of bills in conference. At this point, if one house wants to kill a bill, all it need to do is ... not appoint conferees. Or appoint conferees ... who then never set a time to meet. Now house A can say to house B, if you want your bill on X to get through conference, you need to pass Bill 2, the one we want.

This is where political leadership lies, and it happens in every state ... except Nebraska (and here's a thought question for you ... why not Nebraska?).