Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin is calling on Republican members of the U.S. Senate to open up their meetings about the new health care law, which is expected…
Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin is calling on Republican members of the U.S. Senate to open up their meetings about the new health care law, which is expected to be put to a vote in Congress before their July break.
The U.S. House of Representatives approved its version of a health care plan in early May. Its goal is to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act—former President Obama’s signature legislation.
Republican leadership in the Senate, however, has been making changes to the bill, but Manchin said in a conference call with reporters Tuesday that those meetings have been happening behind closed doors without any input from Democratic — and even some Republican — members of the chamber.
Manchin said the Senate bill will likely emerge from those meetings looking very similar to the one passed in the House, which he called devastating for West Virginia.
Manchin said 50,000 West Virginians who have access to substance abuse treatment programs thanks to the expansion of Medicaid through the ACA will lose their coverage.
“The state is going to have to come up with an exorbitant amount of money in order to provides services,” Manchin said.
West Virginia’s Republican Sen. Shelley Moore Capito has said she has concerns with the House version of the bill, but has not said whether she will support the Senate’s revised plan.
Members of the House are not budging on reforming the state’s tax code the way Gov. Jim Justice and now Senators on both sides of the aisle want…
Members of the House are not budging on reforming the state’s tax code the way Gov. Jim Justice and now Senators on both sides of the aisle want to.
Delegates voted Friday afternoon in favor of an amended bill that leaves the state’s sales tax at 6 percent, but gets rid of a number of exemptions, implementing the tax on cell phones, gym memberships and many other goods and services.
The original version of the bill—which was approved by a bi-partisan vote in the Senate late Thursday night—would have increased the sales tax to 6 and a half percent and reduced the state’s personal income tax.
The Senate bill was yet another push toward the tax reform initiatives the chamber has been attempting to push through the legislative process since February.
But House Speaker Tim Armstead said his chamber is not interested in that type of tax reform.
“If we’re truly going to do tax reform, let’s not do it in this Christmas tree fashion where we continue to start with the personal income tax to get this segment of votes and add this and take that away,” he said. “Let’s do it from top to bottom and do it in a way that makes sense.”
The sales tax bill approved in the House Friday will be the base of the chamber’s budget bill, but must still be approved in the Senate.
Lawmakers have until June 30 to pass a budget to avoid a government shutdown.
Members of the Senate have approved a budget for the upcoming fiscal year — for a second time this week. The bill they approved Tuesday contains no new…
Members of the Senate have approved a budget for the upcoming fiscal year — for a second time this week.
The bill they approved Tuesday contains no new revenue for 2018 and makes major cuts to both higher education and Medicaid in order to find a balance, but the new version of the budget bill approved Thursday night is accompanied by yet another tax reform bill that now has bi-partisan support in the state’s upper chamber.
The passage of the budget and tax reform measures came after a contentious meeting Thursday morning that both Democrats and members of the House walked out of early after what Democratic Del. Lind Longstreth said were rude comments from a Republican Senator directed a Democrats.
Negotiations over a tax reform bill had broken down earlier in the week, causing both chambers to approve separate budgets with no new revenue for the 2018 fiscal year, but Justice — who decided to back the tax reform initiative on the final night of the regular session — wasn’t ready to walk away from the issue Thursday.
Credit West Virginia Governor’s Office
/
Gov. Jim Justice.
He called the meeting with lawmakers and a select group of lobbyists to push the issue and present one more tax reform bill.
“If we don’t do this, then we’ve got to cut. There’s no way around it. We’ve gotta cut,” Justice said, adding he’s not willing to make those cuts.
So, late Thursday night Senators were presented with yet another tax reform bill.
After countless variations over the past two months, this bill raises the sales tax to 6.5 percent and gets rid of exemptions for cell phones, gym memberships, and a number of other items and services. It restructures the state’s severance tax on coal, giving mining companies a break when the price per ton is low and charging them more when it’s high.
It creates an income tax exemption for military retirement and some Social Security pay and ends an $11.7 million sales tax transfer to the state road fund.
But the biggest piece is the reduction of the personal income tax. In this bill, the tax rate would be reduced by 5 percent on Jan. 1, 2018, for any income under $150,000. Wage earners in the highest brackets will not receive the large tax cuts that were once included in the Senate bill.
The bill proposes cutting the tax rates by another 5 percent each year for the following three years, but sets up economic triggers, or essentially revenue benchmarks that the state must meet for those additional reductions to kick in.
When put to a vote Thursday night, 30 of 34 Senators voted in favor of the bill, including 10 of 12 Democratic members, like Sen. Mike Romano.
“We really got everything we asked for,” he said. “We’re in a dire situation and we had to address that and close our budget deficit.”
During that morning meeting, Romano said, Democratic members of the Senate offered additional changes to the tax reform plan that were embraced by both the governor and Senate Republicans and incorporated into the bill that was placed before them.
Credit Will Price / West Virginia Legislative Photography
/
West Virginia Legislative Photography
Sen. Mike Romano on the Senate floor.
“When you look at it, what the Republican caucus wanted was really a trickle-down theory budget that rewarded the very top wage earners at the expense of the middle class and working wage earners,” Romano said. “[We worked it] into a bill that gave a middle-class tax cut and still balanced the budget.”
Senate Majority Leader Ryan Ferns said those tax cuts in the top income brackets were not just for wage earners, but also for LLCs and other small businesses that could have used the cuts to create new jobs. But, he said, the latest bill is only the beginning.
“As much as people don’t probably want to hear this, this isn’t by any means the end of tax reform,” he said. “This is very much a small first step at taking a bite at the apple.”
Credit Will Price / West Virginia Legislative Photography
/
West Virginia Legislative Photography
Senate Majority Leader Ryan Ferns.
After the passage of the revenue bill, Senators also voted with a bi-partisan majority to send a budget based on the new revenue to the House.
That budget matches what Justice presented in a revenue adjustment letter earlier this month and includes a 2 percent teacher pay raise, the full funding of Medicaid, limits higher education cuts to 2 percent for most schools and 4.4 percent for Marshall and West Virginia Universities, and essentially, according to Ferns, maintains government spending.
“This doesn’t reduce much government spending,” he said, “but it freezes government spending. We will spend in 2018 what we spent in 2017.”
Both bills will be sent to the House of Delegates, which could take them up in a floor session scheduled for 10 a.m. Friday.
Both Ferns and Romano are pleading with delegates to consider the latest versions, but House Republicans have been staunchly opposed to the personal income tax changes and the increase to the consumer sales tax since they were initially proposed.
House Speaker Tim Armstead spoke with reporters after the governor’s morning meeting, but before the Senate’s action Thursday night, saying that if Justice continued to push for tax reform, he would be shutting the government down.
“If the governor is going to insist on introducing another bill to try to do something that has been voted down three times already, I don’t think that helps anything,” Armstead said. “I don’t think that gets us closer.”
Both the state Auditor and Treasurer’s Offices have said without a budget bill, they’ll begin having difficulties paying bills and payroll starting as soon as Monday, but lawmakers have until June 30 to pass a bill and avoid a government shutdown.
Gov. Jim Justice said Wednesday the budget proposals being considered in both the House and Senate are wrong for West Virginia and will result in major…
Gov. Jim Justice said Wednesday the budget proposals being considered in both the House and Senate are wrong for West Virginia and will result in major cuts that hurt vulnerable citizens, but with a deadline to approve a budget in time to avoid a government shutdown quickly approaching, Justice said he would consider signing the budget sent to him.
Members of both the House and Senate have approved different versions of a $4.225 billion for the upcoming fiscal year.
That level is based on an updated revenue estimate sent to the Senate Tuesday, which increased the previous estimate sent to lawmakers of $4.055 billion in revenue for 2018.
Credit Joni Deutsch / West Virginia Public Broadcasting
/
West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Above are the governor’s two revenue estimates for the 2018 fiscal year. On the left, the estimates given to lawmakers are the start of the regular session. On the right, the estimate provided to the Senate this week based on the passage of Gov. Justice’s road funding bill.
In an interview with West Virginia Public Broadcasting, Justice said both plans still rely on cuts rather than increasing any revenue through tax reform measures considered by both chambers during the regular session and at the crux of budget negotiations since the start of the regular session.
“Where this thing is today is going to be catastrophic,” he said. “It’s going to hurt our miners or our teachers or something to some magnitude.”
Delegates from both parties have blamed the governor for the length of the current special budget session, saying he has attempted force them to agree to a tax reform plan based on reducing the personal income tax that they have made clear they will not accept.
Justice said “it’s simply not true” that the lack of progress in negotiations is solely his fault, adding he’s been focused on coming to a budget agreement since his first day in office.
Still, the governor said he has not decided if he will sign or veto a budget bill that does not include any new revenue. That decision he said is based on timing.
“If I get with two days left from the deadline, then you’ve got to make a horribly difficult decision that is no win, no win,” he said. “If the only thing left to do is to shutdown government, then the right thing to do might be to go ahead and sign it.”
Wednesday, members of the House of Delegates approved their own version of a budget for the upcoming 2018 fiscal year—a budget that, much like the one…
Wednesday, members of the House of Delegates approved their own version of a budget for the upcoming 2018 fiscal year—a budget that, much like the one approved earlier in the week in the Senate, does not include any new revenue from various tax reform measures debated between the two chambers for weeks.
Instead, the House used the increased revenue estimate sent this week by Gov. Jim Justice’s Office to members of the Senate as the base for its $4.225 billion budget.
House Finance Chair Eric Nelson said the 2018 budget is very similar to that of 2017, the current budget year, but spends “roughly $30 million less.”
Credit Perry Bennett / West Virginia Legislative Photography
/
West Virginia Legislative Photography
House Finance Chair Eric Nelson, right, speaks with a member of the House before their Wednesday floor session.
His committee approved a $4.28 billion budget earlier in the week, but that bill was based on the increased revenue that would have resulted from a revenue bill worked in a House and Senate conference committee.
That bill increased revenues by removing exemptions from the sales tax, imposing it on things like cell phones, gym memberships, and many other services. The bill, however, was never put to a vote in the House because the three Republican members of the conference committee refused to approve it.
In order to reduce spending from the House Finance Committee’s budget to fit within the revenue parameters, Nelson said the House chose to do three things:
Cut the $10 million of funding the House wanted to put in a surplus account in the Public Employees Insurance Agency, or PEIA
Take $12 million from the Senate’s operating budget, leaving the chamber with a $6 million surplus, or about one year’s operating budget
Include directive language requiring $25 million in surplus money that Nelson said is likely to come in in 2018 to fund the Medicaid line item in the budget
In their budget approved earlier in the week, Senators voted to cut by some $35 million each both the Medicaid line item and higher education institutions across the state. Medicaid dollars are matched 3 to 1 by the federal government.
House leadership called those cuts devastating, making the three adjustments to avoid any cuts to the Medicaid line and restore some funding to higher education institutions. Most schools in the state would still receive a 2 percent cut in 2018 under the latest House plan, with the exception of Marshall and West Virginia Universities, where cuts would total 4.4 percent.
Before the 69- 30 vote Wednesday afternoon, several members of the chamber commented that while the bill wasn’t perfect, it was better than a government shutdown, but Pendleton County Democrat Isaac Sponagule called the special session a “total disaster,” saying the House was voting to send a bill to the governor almost identical to the budget vetoed in April.
House Speaker Tim Armstead refuted those notions, noting the bill no longer includes any money from the state’s Rainy Day Fund and restores funding in many areas that had been previously cut, like Medicaid.
After the vote, the amended bill was sent across the rotunda to the Senate where it seemed unlikely Wednesday night that members would concur with the adjustments.
Senate Majority Leader Ryan Ferns said that decision will likely be made for two reasons. The first, members of the House have not approved the two bills presented by Justice to increase funding for road maintenance and construction, which is the basis of the $130 million increase to the revenue estimate sent to the Senate Tuesday.
Credit Perry Bennett / West Virginia Legislative Photography
/
West Virginia Legislative Photography
Senate Majority Leader Ryan Ferns on the Senate floor Wednesday evening.
The second, Ferns said, is because the bill contains more than $50 million of what he calls one- time money, which included the $25 million in future surplus dollars that will be directed to the Medicaid funding line. That leaves the House budget structurally unbalanced, Ferns said.
Ferns said the Senate will likely take up the House message of the budget bill’s passage Thursday.
If Senators refuse to concur with the House budget, the bill will go to a conference committee.
If lawmakers do not approve a budget by Monday, June 19, the state Auditor and Treasurer’s Offices have said it will become more difficult for their offices to perform necessary functions, like paying bills or making future payroll. If a budget is not approved by June 30, state government—and all of its services—will shutdown.
After yet another day of back and forth between the House and Senate, Speaker Tim Armstead says lawmakers are now close to an agreement on the 2018…
After yet another day of back and forth between the House and Senate, Speaker Tim Armstead says lawmakers are now close to an agreement on the 2018 budget.
And that agreement could likely come without the passage of any tax reform measures.
On Tuesday morning, members of the legislative conference committee debating tax reform held a breif meeting to discuss yet another option, took a break, and returned Tuesday afternoon to a make a final decision about what version of the plan they would include in their final report.
But instead, what resulted was a non-decision.
Republican members of the Senate refused to sign the conference committee report because it did not include their hard-fought reduction to the state’s personal income tax—a reform measure the caucus has been pushing since the start of the regular session in February and Gov. Jim Justice has also recently gotten on board with.
Without a majority of signatures of members of both chambers, that report could not be sent to the Senate and, therefore, not put to a vote.
Credit Perry Bennett / West Virginia Legislative Photography
/
West Virginia Legislative Photography
Senate Majority Leader Ryan Ferns during a Tuesday floor session.
“Our goal really was to pass transformative tax reform that would avoid a lot of these cuts, or maybe even all of them,” Senate Majority Leader Ryan Ferns, who co-chaired the conference committee, said Tuesday night, “and that’s what we’ve really been working on this whole time up until today.”
“But it became clear today that no compromise was able to be reached between the majorities in the House and the Senate.”
Ferns gave his interview after, by a party-line vote, members of the Senate approved a budget bill.
That budget bill does include a higher level of spending than the bill Justice vetoed in April, but that new revenue wasn’t brought in by making changes to the state’s tax code, like Ferns and his fellow Republicans Senators wanted.
Instead, the $4.225 billion budget was based on something lawmakers don’t control—the governor’s newly released revenue estimate.
The estimate tells lawmakers how much money the Governor’s Office anticipates the state will bring in during the next fiscal year, or, essentially, how much money they have to spend. The adjustment letter dated Tuesday increases previous estimates by some $170 million, inching lawmakers closer to closing a budget gap.
Republican Senators voted Tuesday night to close that remaining gap by cutting nearly $35 million from higher education institutions across the state and another $35 million from Medicaid—money that the federal government matches 3-to-1.
“These are the revenues that we have available to us,” Ferns said as he defended the cuts on the Senate floor. “We’re spending every single dollar that we anticipate bringing in and so cuts have to be made somewhere. They’re certainly not desired, but spending reductions had to be made somewhere.”
The decision to move a budget without any new revenue was criticized by Senate Democrats, who have largely aligned with members of the House in recent weeks when it comes to tax reform.
Instead of the Senate Republican plan to increase the sales tax in order to drastically reduce the personal income tax, Democrats have backed a slight sales tax increase paired with the end of some tax exemptions to generate more money.
Credit Perry Bennett / West Virginia Legislative Photography
/
West Virginia Legislative Photography
Sen. John Unger questions Sen. Ryan Ferns during a Tuesday evening floor session.
Sen. John Unger said a majority of lawmakers support the conference committee report that contained that exact proposal, but by holding out on signing that report, Senate Republicans were choosing to make cuts that could be avoided.
“Mr. President, it looks like you all didn’t get your way and you just want to take your marbles home and not play anymore and that’s unfortunate because this game is going to hurt a lot of people,” he said in a floor speech before the vote.
The Republican majority in the Senate approved the bill though and shortly after, it was reported to members of the House.
The House read the bill a first time—the first of three necessary readings before it can be put to a final vote in the chamber. What seemed like a surprising move really wasn’t, said House Speaker Tim Armstead, because “the Senate and the House budget are not that far apart.”
Armstead is referring to the budget the House Finance Committee had approved earlier in the day Tuesday. That bill spends about $60 million more than the Senate version and could be put to a vote in the chamber as early as Wednesday.
So, while Armstead said his members would like to avoid the deep cuts to higher education and Medicaid made in the Senate version, it is also possible that after all of the back and forth, lawmakers could approve a budget for 2018 this week that includes no new revenue from a tax reform plan.
The question remains, however, if the governor will actually sign a budget that includes more than $100 million in cuts that aren’t accounted for in his own plan. Justice proposed increasing taxes to avoid significant cuts in any areas, but he has also made it clear — he will not allow the government to shut down to avoid those cuts.
Lawmakers have until June 30 to approve a budget bill— and Justice has until that same day to sign it—to avoid a shutdown.
