Gov. Mike Dunleavy asked Republican lawmakers in the state House on Wednesday not to show up for the beginning of a special session he called for next month, to prevent his vetoes from being overridden.
Dunleavy made the request in a meeting with House minority members Wednesday. Officially, the Republican governor called the special session, set for Aug. 2, to address education reform and the creation of a state agriculture department.
“Governor Dunleavy asked House minority members to not show up for the first five days of session because like any governor, he does not want his vetoes overturned,” Dunleavy spokesperson Jeff Turner said in a statement.
Turner said arriving on the sixth day of the session would allow lawmakers to begin with a “clean slate for conversations on public education reform policies.”
In June, Dunleavy struck $150 million in general funds from the state budget using his line-item veto power, including more than $50 million lawmakers set aside for public schools. The vetoes also included $25 million for school maintenance and nearly $27 million for wildland firefighting.
Dunleavy also vetoed three other bills after lawmakers adjourned in May — one that would sharply limit payday loans, another that would address a shortage of housing for rural teachers, and a third that would bolster the Legislature’s oversight of oil and gas tax revenue.
The state Constitution requires lawmakers to consider veto overrides within five days of the start of their next session. Large, bipartisan majorities approved much of what Dunleavy vetoed, and if House Republicans decline to attend the beginning of the session, that would make it nearly impossible for lawmakers to override him.
Turner said Dunleavy was willing to “reinstate” the funding he vetoed “if he and lawmakers can reach an agreement on the education bill he will introduce next month.”
The leaders of the state House and Senate’s bipartisan majority caucuses said they were shocked at the governor’s request that lawmakers not attend the start of the session he called.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” House Speaker Bryce Edgmon, a Dillingham independent, said in an interview.
“Really, a governor would do that? Call a special session and then inform some members not to show up? How bizarre is that?” Edgmon said. “I have to tell you that from every appearance, it would seem like the special session is, at least in some way, compromised before it even begins.”
“That is just absurd, really,” said Senate President Gary Stevens, a Kodiak Republican. “I think it's honestly unconscionable to the governor to call a special session and tell a minority not to show up.”
Neither leader said they could recall a similar move from a governor in their decades-long careers in state politics.
Dunleavy declined an interview request.
Big Lake Republican Kevin McCabe, though, said he thought the governor’s move was fair game — just one of many political maneuvers used by both parties to get their way using any tool at their disposal.
“Should it work like this? No. In a perfect world, it never would work like this,” McCabe said. “But we don't live in a perfect world.”
McCabe compared Dunleavy’s request to a vote House leaders called to reduce the Permanent Fund dividend, leveraging the absence of three Republicans to overcome internal divisions that threatened to derail progress on the state budget.
McCabe blamed the Senate’s bipartisan, Democrat-heavy majority caucus for not compromising with the governor on policies that Dunleavy argues would boost the state’s bottom-of-the-nation test scores.
McCabe suggested that a generation of Alaska children would suffer “because the Senate doesn't like the governor.”
“He has no other political agenda — he's a lame duck governor, right? — other than to get his policy changes through,” McCabe said.
Stevens, the Senate president, said his requests to meet with the governor to find common ground had been repeatedly rebuffed.
Several House minority Republican lawmakers said in interviews Thursday they did not plan to heed the governor’s request to stay away from the Capitol during the first five days of the special session, including Soldotna Republican Rep. Justin Ruffridge.
“It struck me as being asked to not represent my district, and I think that's a request that I don't intend to honor,” he said. “I don't think that the people of my district would appreciate very much their representative not showing up to do the work when the work is being called to be done.”
Rep. Jeremy Bynum, a Ketchikan Republican, said he, too, planned to be in Juneau for the start of the special session, as did Fairbanks Republican Rep. Will Stapp. All three have said on multiple occasions that they’re willing to override vetoes from Dunleavy, subject to a few caveats.
“I signed up to be in the House of Representatives. That includes special sessions,” said Rep. Bill Elam, Republican of Soldotna. “I'm going to do my job, and I'm going to be where I need to be for the work, so my plan right now would be to be down in Juneau.”
Elam voted to override Dunleavy’s veto of the key bill that raised the amount schools are supposed to get from the state under its public school funding formula, House Bill 57. But asked whether he’d support a vote that would restore the education funding Dunleavy cut, Elam said he was undecided.
Rep. Sarah Vance, a Homer Republican, said the request was “unusual” but said she did not plan to attend the start of the session unless her constituents asked her to.
“I agree with (Dunleavy) in that I believe we should be focusing on (education) policy right now,” she said. “Since I will be a no vote, my absence also counts as a no vote, and it will save Alaskans money by my presence not being there until day six, when I'm ready to work.”
McCabe, who has consistently opposed the education funding increases that have won over some of his fellow minority Republican caucus members, said he would not attend the start of the session. He said he’d be in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho at the conference of a pro-life nonprofit group.
“It would be helpful if our team stayed together, but we haven't proven that we're very good at that through the last year,” McCabe said. “Everybody’s got their own agenda. Typical Republicans.”
Lawmakers raised the foundation of the funding formula, the base student allocation, by $700 per student in a 46-14 vote in May, overriding a veto from Dunleavy to do so. But Dunleavy vetoed roughly 30% of the funding necessary for the increase.
Even if every minority Republican attends the session, it’s unclear whether lawmakers would have the 45 votes necessary to undo Dunleavy’s line-item veto. One, Democratic Anchorage Sen. Forrest Dunbar, is abroad on a National Guard deployment.
Stevens said he did not anticipate making significant progress on the governor’s two listed priorities during the special session. He said he expected lawmakers would gavel in as scheduled, consider one or more veto overrides, and gavel out in time for lawmakers to make the evening flight out of Juneau that same day.
Stevens said hoped enough lawmakers would attend in order to override the governor’s line-item veto of education funding. If the effort failed, Stevens said lawmakers would seek to address the issue when they return for the regular session in Juneau. But he warned that minority Republicans could face backlash from their constituents if they follow the governor’s request.
“If they stay away and we only meet for one day, and education funding fails because they're not there, I don't think that bodes well for them in future elections,” he said.
Republican Nikiski Sen. Jesse Bjorkman said the episode did not bode well for the future of Dunleavy's legislative priorities.
"Unfortunately, what this means is it'll be really hard for him to get anything done further," he said.
KDLL’s Ashlyn O’Hara contributed reporting.
Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly said that a House vote reduced the Permanent Fund dividend to $1,000. That particular vote cut it to roughly $1,400.
