In recent days, veiled threats by House Minority Leader Rep. Calvin Schrage against Speaker Cathy Tilton and Senate Majority Leader Sen. Cathy Giessel against Senate President Gary Stevens might be chalked up to careless hyperbole during a heated debate.
Schrage made an “if-then” threat against Tilton, and Giessel menaced the Senate president by saying that if her amendment didn’t pass, his house would get broken into. The statements came close to coercion.
But there’s another possible form of coercion going on in the Capitol: Horse trading run amuck. In the halls of the building, members of the body are saying that Sen. Bill Wielechowski is holding the House hostage by not allowing as many as nine bills to come to the floor — unless the House passes Sen. Scott Kawasaki’s rewrite of House Bill 129, which originally was a bill from Rep. Srarah Vance to clean up Alaska’s voter registration rolls.
Kawasaki hijacked HB 129 by by inserting multiple bills into it, with election ideas from the Democrats, including having the government pay for the stamps on mail-in ballots.
The terms of the deal Wielechowski is said to offering the House is that it either concurs with the new bill version or the House bills won’t be heard; as Rules chair, Wielechowski has the power to enforce that.
Vance already told the Senate Finance Committee on Monday that she would not be able to get concurrence on the bill, after Kawasaki completely gutted it and made it into a different bill.
Wielechowski is a political ally of Kawasaki. Both are Democrats — Wielechowski is from Anchorage, Kawasaki is from Fairbanks. They’re both part of the Democrat majority in the Senate. Both want to increase vote by mail, which is what Kawasaki’s rewrite of Vance’s bill does, in party.
When horse trading become coercion, then the aspect of public corruption is a concern, because it requires a legislator to vote in a certain way — in a way they would not normally vote — in order to have their own bills moved. That is a concern now being expressed in the hallways of the Capitol.
