Sen. Matt Claman, a Democrat from Anchorage, wasted no time after a veto override vote failed this week in the Legislature.
One day after a joint session failed to override Senate Bill 140, a quarter-billion-dollar spending package, Claman proposed a Senate joint resolution that would, if passed by voters, lower the threshold for overriding all vetoes to two-thirds of the 60 legislators. Currently, the threshold is three-quarters for fiscal bills, and two-thirds for non-fiscal bills.
Senate Joint Resolution 15 was read into the Senate State Affairs Committee and voted on without so much as a comment.
“We have a Senator Claman bill, I wonder if you have any final statements,” said committee chair Sen. Scott Kawasaki. Claman had no statement. None of the other members of the committee had statements or questions to say about it. They passed it out of the committee with no discussion.
The resolution will go to the Rules Committee, where Sen. Bill Wielechowski will move it to the floor of the Senate. It could reach the House by next week.
The resolution would put the question before voters — should the Legislature have more power to override the governor on a veto? Democrats think so, because their attempt failed by just one vote, even though they had coopted many Republicans to vote with them.
The recourse, according to Claman and the Democrats on the House State Affairs Committee, is to take power from the governor.
The reason Alaska has a strong executive branch is because the framers of the Alaska Constitution saw what special interests were doing in the Territorial Legislature, and in other states. They made the executive branch strong to counter-balance the special interest that even today walk the halls of the state Capitol and work influence for groups like the NEA, and AFL-CIO. Without a strong executive branch, the governor is more of a figurehead, reduce to kissing babies and cutting ribbons, while the Legislature can — and has shown a proclivity to — reduce the Permanent Fund dividend to zero.
The two Republicans on the committee, Sen. Kelly Merrick of Eagle River and Sen. Jesse Bjorkman of North Kenai, voted with the Democrats, who control both the committee and the Senate.
