Republicans won’t vote on the bond bill until the Seaford charter bill passes.
Minority Leader Mike Ramone, R-Pike Creek, said Republicans who walked out of the House Thursday night will hold the bond bill hostage until the House Democrats agree to pass a charter change for the town of Seaford.
“We’re not going to be voting until you pass reasonable bills,” he said. “They have a lot of young people. I guess they just don’t understand that they haven’t needed us all year. So they’re just doing what they’ve been doing to us all year. Well, now they need us.”
Democrats have a majority in both the Delaware House and Senate. Most bills pass on a simple majority, but constitutionals and other bills require a greater number of ayes. To get those percentages in the House, the Democrats need at least some Republicans.
The bond bill, for example, needs a ¾ majority to pass, which is 30 votes.
The bill that Republicans want passed is House Substitute 1 for House Bill 121, sponsored by Rep. Daniel Short, R-Seaford.
It would have approved a charter change for the town of Seaford that would have allowed an LLC with a business in town to have a single vote in municipal elections, even if the owner lives outside the city.
The bill had been the source of controversy along with coverage from national news organizations, leading to some hate being directed at the government of Seaford.
Ramone said each day the GOP demands aren’t met, the GOP will want more and more assurance that some of their bills passed.
“So as of now, tonight, all we wanted to do was pass 121,” Ramone said about 9 p.m. “Tomorrow, we want 121 to pass the House and the Senate.
The next day he said, the Republicans will want the bill he introduced to curtail the power of the Department of Natural Resource and Environmental Control over electric vehicles passed by the House.
“The next day we want the EV bill passed out of the Senate,” he said. “Every day we wait, what we want will be more and more because we don’t need the bond bill passed.”
The EV bill Ramone is referring to is House Bill 123, sponsored by Ramone, that would require the legislature to vote on any regulations on electric vehicles that the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control is trying to pass on its own.
According to Ramone, Republicans were promised that the Seaford bill would have enough votes to pass on Thursday.
Several other towns in Delaware had made similar changes to their charters without the same level of opposition.
Seaford’s bill had some built-in protections that included not allowing a resident to vote personally and then also for his or her business; registration rules that would prevent someone from voting 31 times, as happened in Newark; and more.
Short’s bill needed 27 votes in favor, so even though it received a simple majority with 22 to 18, it didn’t have enough votes to pass.
Ramone said that nothing has improved despite the state spending more than $5 billion in bond bills over the past five years.
“How do we spend $5.5 billion and everything’s worse, opportunities lost, ridiculous spending, people picking winners and losers, and people kind of just raping the system,” Ramone said. “That needs to stop. What we need to start doing is representing Delawareans, not woke groups that come in with a bunch of money to get their peeps elected and now they’ve accumulated enough of those peeps that they can get their woke agenda addressed. That’s very scary.”
A separate bill, House Bill 189, sponsored by Rep. Sherry Dorsey Walker, D-Wilmington, would ban LLCs from being able to vote in municipal elections.
That bill, which was introduced on June 2 and assigned to the House Administration Committee, has not had a hearing or made any progress since being introduced.
While the House is able to pass a majority of its bills without input from Republicans, the bond bill isn’t one of those bills, which means it can’t be passed until Friday’s session.
The Democrats in the House continued to vote on bills they could pass without Republicans as the GOP members went home.
Share this Post