I'm back home, I was again at the door to the Joint Finance Committee's hearing. This was the executive session, which is the time when members of the committee debate each other, and offer and adopt amendments to the bill. The public is allowed in to watch, but do not participate in the proceedings like they did in the public hearing. I was at the door again. A protest was staged outside the doors, with drums and musical instruments. Lots of chanting and shouting, and one particular guy with a megaphone who was trying to incite the police officers that were assisting me. At one point he started talking about how he, and everyone else was going to jail tonight, citing his years of activism (he looked to be about 20-25yr). The rest of the crowd booed him down and took away his megaphone, and followed up declaring that no one was going to jail tonight, which is quite true, during the last 3 days of protests, there have been no arrests, which even in tame protests, there are people who decide to get violent or destructive.
For those of you who might be interested in the process, the bill was just passed out of the Joint Finance Committee, with an omnibus amendment that mostly added corrections to other bills that have already been passed this session. Only a handful were amending the bill itself, with the primary addition being that limited term employees will not have their access to health and retirement benefits completely revoked.
There was an amendment offered by the minority to remove the language from the bill that will deny collective bargaining (unionizing) rights to state employees. This amendment was not adopted.
The next step is the Senate, which will be called to order tomorrow.
Once again I'm looking at work tomorrow.
We are in session, which is just off the rotunda, which is currently full of protesters sleeping on the floor. It is going to be deafeningly loud, and we are going to have a very hard time keeping the public from physically disrupting the session. Luckily I probably won't be doing the door tomorrow, as I usually run the sound board for the Senator's mics. I understand we're getting national and international press for what's going on here, so you may be hearing about this if you follow the news.
I also submitted a request to move this to general discussion, as it has become less of a life advice thread.