Last week Governor Kristi Noem vetoed two bills that passed with near unanimity. House Bill 1012 and House Bill 1013 sought to clean up 194 outdated or otherwise faulty statutory cross-references. HB 1012’s 168 sections amend 35 titles of South Dakota Codified Law dealing with State Affairs and Government, Public Officers and Employees, Counties, Municipal Government, Taxation, Planning Zoning and Housing Programs, Elections, Education…. HB 1013 deploys another 26 sections edits eleven titles.
Were I Governor, I might have vetoed HB 1013 just for sloppiness: HB 1012 has the courtesy to list the statutes it amends in numerical order, while HB 1013 hops back and forth through the lawbooks, complicating my counting. But Governor Noem looks at all the disparate titles the Legislature is trying to amend and throws the single-subject flag:
…as adopted, House Bill 1012 amends 168 sections of code over eighty-eight pages and more than 30,000 words. These are sections of code that in no way relate to each other. Article III, Section 21 of the Constitution of South Dakota states that “No law shall embrace more than one subject, which shall be express in its title.” The only “one subject” I can discern in this bill is “to revise the code,” which is a subject so broad as to render the constitutional requirement meaningless.
If this effort to clean up the code continues, I ask that separate clean-up bills be brought for each related chapter of code… [link added; Gov. Kristi Noem, veto letter to HB 1012, 2020.03.12].
Governor Noem also complains that the sponsors—House Judiciary, acting at the request of the Code Commission—didn’t consult with the affected state agencies… but I’m not convinced they are all that affected by simple statutory clean-up.
The main reason for the single-subject rule is to ensure that no legislator sneaks some nefarious law into the books via a bill that’s too long or complicated for anyone to read. But Governor Noem identifies no such pernicious change in either bill. HB 1012 and HB 1013 both bear the title “correct technical errors in statutory cross-references”; if that is indeed the full intent and scope of these bills, then correction of technical errors is indeed a single subject.
Speaker Steven Haugaard says complying with Noem’s veto letters would require legislators to craft “about a thousand bills.” Given that we have two basketball-free weeks until Veto Day, legislators might have time to do just that. Actually, one could single-subjectify these two bills in about ten minutes: just paste HB 1012 and HB 1013 into a spreadsheet, fill down some new bill numbers in the next column, then make a bill template in Word, run a mail merge, and there you go: HB 1012 and HB 1013 become 194 new bills, which each chamber could pass on consent calendar in one fell swoop. Then send all 196 bills to Governor Noem to review and sign. Ha! See if she ever stamps “single-subject” on a veto letter again!
Or the Legislature could save everyone some time and just override these two petty vetoes. What’s the Governor going to do, take you all to court? With Jason Ravnsborg prosecuting? Right!
Thank you, Governor Noem.
I skimmed those bills, and didn’t see any nefariousness that was obvious to me. I stress that second phrase, specially the “obvious to me” part. I didn’t spend a lot of time analyzing all sections, and that, I think is the point of the Constitutional one subject requirement. I spent about an hour, focused on sections dealing with titles involving environment, water, mining, elections, ballot measures, public records and meetings and education. The rest I ignored. I suspect there are maybe 10-15 people, all high-powered lobbyists, who bothered to read those bills, and they probably just skimmed it like I did. I doubt anyone studied them to tease out any and all possible ramifications.
I read these bills now because I know that they are sometimes packed with nefarious intent. Back in 1984 the people voted for an initiative on nuclear waste. After we had beaten back Chem-Nuclear two years later, repeal of that initiated measure was done by hiding it in a 100-page “clean-up” bill. We didn’t realize what had been done until three years later.
It was our mistake to actually believe the bill was only “clean up.” Neither I nor our lobbyists at the time caught it. It was, after all, the first time they had done it this way at the legislature, and we made the mistake of reading the first ten pages and thinking, “This is a nothing bill.”
The bill this year might be “a nothing bill,” but it might not, and there is a little thing in the Constitution about bills being about one subject. I think Governor Noem has it right.
“Then send all 196 bills to Governor Noem to review and sign. Ha! See if she ever stamps “single-subject” on a veto letter again!”
That’s funny. And Klueless Kristi was just being a PITA, using something relatively inconsequential to create appearance of diligence.