NAIFEH BLINKED!!

Another big day on the hill-

Steve Gill and Bill Hobbs are really on their game. They have really put heat on Speaker Naifeh for his actions yesterday. The House was abuzz with the news of the NRA hustle that went down yesterday.

Many blogs like Nashville Files are reporting on the situation (and probably many more that I haven't had time to see). Bloggers have really drawn attention to the incident by sending e-mails, posting comments, and calling legislators.

Today we started the session and Representative Glen Casada was recognized. I'll try to describe how it happened:

Casada addressed Speaker Naifeh by making a motion that the House vote to reconsider the motion yesterday to send Rep. Curry Todd's bill…

But he didn't get to finish. Naifeh broke in: “You are out of order. Next motion!”

Later Rep. Casada was recognized again. He said something like “Mr. Speaker, under parliamentary procedure I invoke rule 40.”

There was silence.

The Speaker and his staff did not know what to do. They grabbed their procedure and law books and huddled. About 5 minutes passed.

If they did not follow the law again it would look even worse, and by stopping to read the law books, it would even be more obvious.

This rule allows for a motion to be reconsidered--the same thing we asked for earlier.

The speaker mumbled a bit and tried to say how the bill should not have been brought out of committee but he didn't know what else to do. We had him.

There had to be a vote to send it back to the subcommittee where it could be killed or let it move to full committee. Sending it back might be considered a vote against the bill, in other words an “anti-NRA” vote.

To let the bill move on we needed a 2/3 vote-66 votes.
The vote was 47 for, 42 against. It's going back to subcommittee.

Well, at least we were allowed to vote and a few were exposed for their actions. And most importantly, votes were recorded-as they should be in representative government.