I am writing this Reick Report during another beautiful day in Springfield. This week there will be many committee hearings as we get closer to the deadline to pass bills out of committee. That means Democrats will attempt to pass their controvercial bills through committee in the next couple of weeks – more on one of those bills below. Also, we have begun appropriations committee hearings to ask questions of those requesting funding in the upcoming state budget. This is particularly important as the revenue picture is looking worse than the Governor’s Office of Management and Budget anticipated. More on that next week.
Bill Restricting Homeschool Freedom May Move Forward Despite Growing Opposition
Democrats hold a supermajority in the Illinois General Assembly, and for years they’ve wielded their power in ways that inhibit citizen involvement in the legislative process. They’ve done this through a number of strategic moves designed to keep the public in the dark and stifle their viewpoints, especially if those viewpoints run counter to those of the supermajority.
House Bill 2827 is a perfect example. This is a controversial piece of legislation that places severe reporting requirements on home school students and parents. The bill’s sponsor is catching a lot of flak from home schoolers over the bill, and for good reason, because the bill’s preamble seems to imply that parents who home school are abusing or neglecting their kids. They’re guilty until proven innocent. So far, more than 22,000 electronic witness slips have been filed against the bill – about 40 times the number who have so far filed in favor.
H.B. 2827 is nothing more than an attempt to circumvent the long-held rights of parents to homeschool their children, and it also adds new requirements for private schools, not just home schools, across the state to report student information to the state government. (Section 915). It’s using the valid concern of child abuse as a reason to reach beyond the authority of state government to interfere in an area where it currently doesn’t have the authority to act.
The sponsor has issued a statement saying that an amendment is being prepared at the request of the non-public schools, to clarify the language in the bill, which is an attempt to remove their objection to the bill and move their stance to neutral.
While the bill is assigned for a hearing before the Education Policy Committee on Wednesday, it may be delayed for a week to allow the amendment to be drafted and moved out of Rules Committee. Unfortunately, it’s often the case that we don’t find out if a bill is going to be called until minutes before the committee is set to convene, so your guess is as good as mine.
This is the point at which the supermajority will deploy certain procedural measures to ensure that those in opposition are caught off guard, worn down, or worse, will have their testimony negated.
While the legislature must allow witness testimony and accept all witness slips filed for any piece of legislation scheduled for a public hearing, Democrats have found ways around the process. The supermajority has been abusing its authority through schemes designed to infringe upon the right of the public to share their perspective on legislation in public hearings for years.
The most egregious abuse of that authority is the witness slip “shell game”. It’s a tactic used to erase the public record of opposition to a bill by stripping legislative language from a bill that has a large number of witness slips filed in opposition and moving the language to a “shell bill” with a new bill number. Since witness slips stay with the legislation based on original bill number, the new bill now has no opposition filed against it. Often the switch is made without notice to the public, so they have little opportunity to file witness slips for a second time. Also, when the bill comes to the floor of the House for a vote, it’s listed under the number and name of the new “shell”. For instance, it may come up as H.B. 3533, “SCH CD-DIETARY ACCOMMODATIONS” (This is an actual shell bill).
The passage of the SAFE-T Act is a perfect case in point. After multiple witness slips were filed in opposition on the bill when it was before committee for a subject matter hearing, the sponsor attached the SAFE-T Act language to another bill and sent it straight to the floor for a vote. None of the previous opposing witness slips were attached.
Other ways of making it nearly impossible to register publicly available opposition to a bill include:
- Postponing committee hearings or scheduling committees to meet very late at night or in the wee hours of the morning making it extremely difficult for witnesses to attend hearings in person.
- Assigning a bill to a subcommittee that will never meet, reassigning a bill to a different committee with a more friendly chairperson or realigning a committee by swapping out legislative members for those who will vote the “correct way.”
- Holding the bill in the Rules Committee, effectively killing the bill without it ever seeing the light of day or having a prayer of receiving a public hearing.
- Recessing committees to the “call of the chair” instead of adjourning for the week. Allowing the committee chair to bypass the scheduling process and set their own date and time for committee hearings without advance notice.
- Vetting legislation in partisan working groups instead of in public hearings.
Earlier this year, House Republicans made a request to include witness slip portability in the House Rules. To no one’s surprise, this request was summarily denied by the supermajority.
Don’t be fooled by attempts by the majority to explain away each one of these schemes, their goal is to keep the public in the dark and prevent opposing views from being on the record, ultimately violating the right of Illinois residents to have a voice in state policymaking.
House Republicans are monitoring H.B. 2827 and will make every attempt to let the public know the status of the legislation. Those who have already filed witness slips for the bill may want to contact the chair of the Education Policy Committee to make it clear that you want to receive fair notice of when the bill is going to be called so you can exercise your right to oppose and provide testimony.
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