INDIANAPOLIS — Republican leaders in the Indiana House aren’t waiting for their Democratic colleagues to pay up on the $100,000-plus fines they incurred while staging the five-week walkout that ended Monday.
They’re taking collections into their own hands by withholding the Democrats’ $152-a-day spending allowances that legislators receive seven days a week while in session.
The per-diem payments, which had been suspended during the walkout for the missing Democrats, were initially slated to resume Monday when they returned. Instead, House Speaker Brian Bosma has ordered those per-diem allowances to be withheld by the House clerk until the 39 Democrats who fled the state, in a quorum-busting move, pay up. Legislators have already received their salaries; they were paid in February for the entire session.
The fines were imposed under House rules that allow the Speaker to levy financial penalties on House members who intentionally fail to appear with the intent of disrupting a constitutionally mandated quorum. The House needs 67 of its 100 House members to be present to act on legislation.
To undo those fines, it would take a majority of House members to approve a motion rescinding them. That seems unlikely, given that 60 of the House members are Republicans, many of whom were angered by the walkout.
“No, absolutely not, not a chance,” was the answer given by Rep. Heath VanNatter, a Kokomo Republican, when asked if he’d vote to waive the fines.
Fellow Republican Rep. Ed Clere of New Albany wasn’t quite so adamant in his answer, but he doubts his GOP colleagues are interested in absolution. “I don’t think they’re going to be forgiven,” Clere said. “There was an easy way to avoid the fines; they could have come back sooner.”
The House Democrat Minority Leader, Rep. Patrick Bauer of South Bend, has told reporters that fines were “worth it” because the walkout resulted in some changes to legislation that House Democrats deemed detrimental to organized labor.
Rep. Terri Austin, a Democrat from Anderson and ranking member of the House Rules Committee, said she was disappointed that Republicans seemed determined to punish Democrats for executing what she said was a procedural tactic used by both sides in the past. “From my understanding, the fines have always been forgiven,” Austin said.
The way the fines were imposed and the decision to collect on them is a departure from past practices, as in the length of the most recent walkout – one of the longest in U.S. history. In past walkouts that lasted a few hours or a few days, and staged by both parties, the fines were imposed at the discretion of the Speaker and waived as part of the negotiations to get missing lawmakers back.
Rep. Clyde Kersey, a Terre Haute Democrat who took part in the walkout and now owes more than $3,000 in fines for doing so, said that didn’t happen this time. “The fines weren’t part of the negotiations,” Kersey said.
Each of the 39 Democrats who fled the state on Feb. 22 to set up temporary quarters in a hotel in Urbana, Ill., owe about $3,150 in fines. The lone House Democrat who didn’t flee, Rep. Steve Stemler of Jeffersonville, is exempt.
Two weeks into the walkout, House Republicans passed a motion imposing fines on the missing lawmakers for each day their absence prevented the House from reaching a quorum. The fines started at $250 a day and then went up to $350 a day. The total amount is about $122,000.
While the House Democrats were gone, Bosma and other House Republicans talked about reviving an old law, rescinded in 1976, that allowed fines of $1,000 a day.
Still seemingly unresolved is the issue of a week’s worth of per-diems that House Democrats received as part of their paycheck for the first week they were gone. House Democrat leaders vowed to repay that money, but as of Wednesday, the House clerk — who handles payroll issues — had not received any of the payments. Several House Democrats said they’d written out their checks and those checks would all be turned in together.