Palace intrigue

There was some interesting action in the last day's of this year's Delaware General Assembly session.

As those who have read my writing for a long time know, I am a bit of a geek when it comes to voting records. Over the past fifteen years I’ve spent part of my spring and summer poring over bill descriptions and votes taken to put together what was originally known as the monoblogue Accountability Project but last year became the Delaware Accountability Project.

This year I finally came up with a system to track each bill and its vote record as it comes down the pike in a simple spreadsheet form, with the numbers corresponding to bill numbers and the columns devoted to Senate bills, House bills, their respective resolutions, and so forth. It’s all based on the Delaware legislative website, which isn’t quite up to par with where Maryland’s was but has its advantages, too. It’s sort of depressing how many bills pass the House and Senate, respectively, on the order of 41-0, 21-0. (But that’s a story I may do at another time.)

The reason this became noteworthy to me is that there were a series of House votes taken June 29, the penultimate day of this year’s scheduled session, that passed the House with tallies of 24-0 or 25-0. That’s enough to advance most bills on the legislative docket, but there are exceptions, such as the Bond and Capital Improvements bill, which requires a 3/4 majority. That’s where the intrigue came in.