Crossover Day

In at least one way, following the Georgia Legislature is easy: If a bill only has Democratic sponsors, it’s dead and won’t go anywhere. For example, Senate Bill 517 which would specifically exclude breastfeeding from “lewd, lascivious, indecent, or unlawful conduct” is going nowhere. I don’t need to spend any real time on it.

Likewise, many of the bills that I’ve highlighted this session have been categorized in the “interesting, but this won’t be taken up” bucket.

However, the thrust of this posting is about tomorrow. Tomorrow, March 7th, 2012, is this session’s Crossover day. Crossover day is day 30 of the 40 day legislative session and by rule, any bill that has not been approved by one chamber and sent to the other for consideration is dead. If this were last session, which was the first year of the two year legislature, the bill would have been carried into the next session, but there are general elections in November so all the dead bills will be discarded. Someone will be able to start afresh with HB 1 and SB 1 come next January. ((And it won’t be Bobby Franklin because he died this year.))

Crossover day and the days leading up to it are filled with a flurry of action. You can see this by looking at the number of PASSAGE votes by date on the House or Senate voting registers. There are many more as you get closer to day 30 (3/7 this year).

After Crossover day, I’ll do a roundup of what I had been looking at and what’s been passed over to the other chamber, and what’s been passed entirely. There have been a few bills, beyond procedural ones, that have coursed all the way through to the Governor’s signature already.