Upstairs, Downstairs

Things came to something of a head yesterday in the obviously still-evolving relationship between Governor Bill Lee’s administration and the re-constituted leadership of the state House.

It all unfolded over three hours in a pair of legislative committee meetings, one of them quite contentious.

The first was an organizational meeting of the new TANF Working Group, established last Friday by Lt. Gov. Randy McNally and new House Speaker Cameron Sexton. The two speakers acted in response to a still-exploding controversy over those unspent millions in idle surplus in the state’s fund for needy families.

As the Working Group members got themselves organized, both McNally and Sexton sat there with them – observing in silence, and great dignity. This signaled the authority of their offices and also the high-profile seriousness of the task ahead. 

In the second meeting, House Finance Committee members flatly blistered the Lee administration’s commissioner of human services, Danielle Barnes, for sidestepping the legislature on Tuesday when her department announced its own solution to the TANF trouble without any legislative input.

Members of the important House Finance Committee were respectful of Commissioner Barnes but were nonetheless sharply critical of why the administration insisted on a unilateral fix to the TANF surplus. Senior members took turns grilling her (remember, these are mostly all Republicans) and it went on like that for nearly two hours. All Ms. Barnes could do, it seemed, was to apologize and promise to do better. If anyone from the Governor’s staff was in the room, none spoke up and came to her assistance.

From my seat in the gallery, it was not a good afternoon – nor a good look – for the Lee administration. My observations:

1.    Normally, for a new governor anyway, your Transition is wrapped up before your Honeymoon ends with the legislature. But the Lee administration, ten months in, still looks to be in transition insofar as basic legislative protocols. True, the governor filled all the big-shot Cabinet posts early on - that’s the fun part - but the rancor of yesterday suggested other basic procedures are unsettled as yet.

2.    This Transition needs to be over, and soon. Otherwise there may be more hiccups and stumbles in the learning curve of how best to make good policy. (Remember that narrow win on school vouchers last session? That was a honeymoon gift to a new governor. Honeymoons never last into a second session.)

3.    The unfinished work was simply less visible during the first ten months of this year. Through the winter, spring, and most of the summer, the House was going through a highly visible and tortured time of internal regime change. All the headlines coming out of Capitol Hill were about Rep. Glen Casada’s failed speakership and its associated scandals, and then the ins-and-outs of who (mercifully) would succeed him. Once Sexton was anointed by the majority GOP caucus members, that long-running uproar died down.

4.    Speaker Sexton got his own team established rather quickly – not only naming new committees and chairs but also traveling widely across the long state, personally visiting House members in their own communities. He has given the House a fresh start.

5.    Sexton is also much in the same vein as McNally, the speaker of the Senate. Sexton will tell you McNally was an important mentor in his life, and this mutual respect was visible yesterday. Their relationship may exert a leavening effect on any disruptions to come - or so it seems this morning.

6. The two speakers and the seven members they jointly appointed to the new Working Group are among the most senior – and the most distinguished – members of the legislature. The same could be said of the Finance Committee, too. Sidestepping all these on Tuesday was not a smart choice for the Lee team, especially on the matter of TANF non-spending, which legislators have been hearing plenty about from constituents back home.

7.    Looking ahead, the Capitol Hill press corps might keep a close eye on how Lee, McNally, Sexton and their staffs actually move forward from this fracas. Otherwise, we will observe the old political story of “legislative independence” open a new chapter.

As the TANF funding problem is sorted out in the coming months, this week might turn out to have been a valuable measurement of how much work remains to be done between the first and second floors at the capitol.

TANF non-spending and the citizens who genuinely need help remain the foremost concerns here, not legislative relations and protocols, but how this first scandal is resolved could well affect how a lot of other problem-solving goes in the upcoming 2020 session of the 111th General Assembly.

The best plan for putting the TANF surplus to work should be more than just some fast-spending outlays with of a portion of the idle money. Taxpayers deserve some answers to hard questions about why this surplus – now approaching a billion dollars, and higher than all other states’ – swelled so high in the first place. Even disbursing most of it doesn’t feel like the full explanation.

It would be best to see a cooperative approach to all that, and soon, with the leaders of the state’s executive and legislative branches actually working together.