Senate pulls two failed bills from committee

Sen. Joyce Elliott, D-Little Rock, speaks Wednesday, May 27, 2015, against a motion to pull two failed bills from a Senate committee. The bills address shifting the Arkansas presidential primary and the General Assembly's fiscal session.
Sen. Joyce Elliott, D-Little Rock, speaks Wednesday, May 27, 2015, against a motion to pull two failed bills from a Senate committee. The bills address shifting the Arkansas presidential primary and the General Assembly's fiscal session.

The Arkansas Senate on Wednesday approved extracting from a Senate panel stalled bills that would shift the state's presidential primary and the General Assembly's fiscal session.

Senate Bill 8 by Sen. Gary Stubblefield, R-Branch, which would move up Arkansas' presidential primary to join other Southern states previously failed twice in the Senate State Agencies and Governmental Affairs Committee. Senate Bill 5 sponsored by Sen. Jon Woods, R-Springdale, would push the General Assembly's fiscal session in even-numbered years from February to April.

Sen. Joyce Elliott, D-Little Rock, said while speaking against the motion that the body was setting "a very bad precedent" by removing the bills from the committee.

"We have followed a process that we have respected long years in this body," Elliott said. "In less than two months, this will make the second time this body has pulled a bill from a committee to subvert the committee process. We should get used to the fact that we have a process in place and sometimes we don't always win in that process."

No one spoke in favor of the motion.

Senators voted 21-10 to remove those bills from committee and consider them in the full Senate. Extracting a bill from committee requires a majority vote of the 35-member senate.

A vote to suspend the rules and consider the bills in the Senate on Wednesday failed to meet the required two-thirds majority vote. Without suspending the rules, the bills cannot be added to the Senate's calendar for consideration until Friday.

See Thursday's Arkansas Democrat-Gazette for full coverage.

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