The House Rules Committee this morning held all Senate bills in their grasp, a maneuver orchestrated by Del. Maggie McIntosh who wanted to send the other chamber a message that they should release the House bills locked in the Senate rules panel.
"If the Senate moves our bills, we'll move theirs," McIntosh said in an interview this afternoon. "We've got a lot of them and they've got a lot of ours. ... We just want them to move our bills." She guessed that the House Rules Committee is now sitting on 30 to 40 Senate measures.
McIntosh, a Baltimore Democrat, said the move was meant to help all of the House bills locked in the Senate rules committee, and was not focused on the transgender anti-discrimination bill that Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller locked in the rules committee earlier this week.
McIntosh was one of seven House members to send a letter to Miller on Friday asking him to release that bill.
Rules committees are often seen as leadership instruments -- the committees' purpose is to assign bills to other standing committees. A bill that does not get assigned to a standing committee does not have an obvious path to the chamber's floor.
But House maneuver might not have been needed. The Senate Rules Committee met shortly after session today ended and voted out about a half dozen House bills, including the transgender measure. McIntosh said she expects the House Rules Committee to follow suit either this afternoon when the House meets for a second session or tomorrow morning.
However, the House bills aren't out of jeopardy yet: The Senate rules report, which controls the fate of the House bills including the transgender one, must still be read across the floor. That is expected to happen on Wednesday, though any Senator can hold up the entire report.
** UPDATE 4/6/2011: Sen. Kathy Klausmeier, the chair of the Senate Rules Committee, asked that the bills voted out of her committee yesterday hold for a day. That puts the transgender bill, and about half a dozen other measures, in some type of procedural limbo between being assigned to standing committees and having that assignment approved by the Senate.