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Amendments and asks for a Committee of Conference to resolve the differences.
Compromise Measure*
The House and Senate conferees meet, come up with a compromise measure which then goes to both Houses for final passage. This sometimes takes place in the wee hours of the assembly’s closing night.
The procedure has long grated on Sen. Willey, who considers it unfair for the House to have six weeks in a regular session to consider the budget bill while the Senate only has two weeks to come up with its own proposals.
Hence his simple little change in the ground rules.
He plans to introduce an identical budget bill in the Senate at the same time the measure is introduced in the House. The bill will then be referred to nis committee early in the session. Sen. Willey says hearings will be conducted on the measure’s controversial features and a more deliberate approach can then be made to formulating the Senate's position on the appropriations package.
He also insists that the change is not his idea, but that he is making it at the unanimous request of his committee.
Perhaps so, but Capitol observers know that the merest frown of disapproval from the venerable Senator would have kept the plan from ever seeing the light of day.
Complications Expected
Both administration and House sources say privately that the move will vastly complicate, rather than simplify, the budget building process. They worry that instead of a relatively few senate amendments, the conferees at the end of the session will find themselves confronted with the task of reconciling two full-blown pieces of appropriations legislation, with both Houses holding on to strongly entrenched positions on critical items. Whatever the intent of the move may be, and whatever its outcome, the change is, by any objective measure, a major invasion of traditional House turf. Its harshest critics call it a bald bid for power by the Senate in general and by Sen. Willey in particular. Whether the budget process is streamlined, deadlocked, or not changed much by the Willey proposal will be first tested when the 1983 short session convenes in January. That session will be dealing with Gov. Charles S. Robb’s austere mini-budget for the remainder of the 1982-84 biennium. It should be an interesting test. Neither the House nor the Senate regard their prerogatives lightly. Nor does Sen. Ed Willey.
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