How many of you know how bills pass or the in and out of the legislature?
There is a video out there that I saw on Facebook, I am not going to link to, but the person who’s on the video claims that COVID-19 was a "Plandemic" or “planned virus” that the government introduced the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act or the CARES Act in January of 2019!
His pitch is that the government knew about the virus a year before “patient zero” but right away I saw a red flag… my first thought was what was the bill that was introduced in the House (Most states number their bills either H.B. or S.B. Here in Connecticut Senate bills go up to 4999 and House bills state at 5000)? So I looked it up.
Low and behold! The bill introduced in January 2019 was “Middle Class Health Benefits Tax Repeal Act of 2019” Surprise! Surprise!
What clued me off?
Well first off. Everyone should have a working knowledge of our legislatures both state and federal. You should know how a bill becomes law.
Lets go back a couple of steps. How do find a bill in your legislatures? For Congress it is “Congress.gov” and for Connecticut it is “cga.ct.gov” It also has the full history of the bill including all the testimony on the bill.
So when I went to congress.gov for H.R. 748 the first thing that I notice was that there were five summaries so that probably meant five version of the bill.
Bills have a crazy life. Some are introduced as placeholders, in other-words they don’t know the language of the bill so they make something up before the time for introducing a bill ends, for an example the CT Judiciary Committee for the 2020 session was February 7th. So a lot of times the bills get rewritten in committee, an example is in 2019 SB 388 was an intersex bill that was almost entirely changed by the time it made it out of committee. This is the proposed bill and this is the bill that made it out of committee.
Sometimes bills get merged or incorporated into another bill. In 2019 I was following a bill that affected the LGBTQ community and it died in the House… whew! But then a lobbyist friend said not so fast the bill got incorporated in another bill which passed and that is how I ended up on a legislative committee.
Other times the bill doesn’t make it out of committee and you can’t relax because it might come back to life as an amendment.
As I said it is important that you understand the workings of our legislators, on the Facebook page that the video was posted on got some very heavy comments, there were some people who were falling for the conspiracy theory.
This morning I have a conference call with a lawyer and a student from Harvard law school for a debriefing on a case we worked on for the Amicus Curiae brief for the Commission on Human Rights and Opportunity (CHRO) for the Declaratory Ruling on October 31, 2019 Petition Regarding Health Insurers’ Categorization of Certain Gender Confirming Surgeries as Cosmetic last month. That was the case where they found that insurance cannot discriminate against trans people.
Update 12:45
From the meeting we learned that the defendant only has a few more weeks to appeal the decision.
There is a video out there that I saw on Facebook, I am not going to link to, but the person who’s on the video claims that COVID-19 was a "Plandemic" or “planned virus” that the government introduced the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act or the CARES Act in January of 2019!
His pitch is that the government knew about the virus a year before “patient zero” but right away I saw a red flag… my first thought was what was the bill that was introduced in the House (Most states number their bills either H.B. or S.B. Here in Connecticut Senate bills go up to 4999 and House bills state at 5000)? So I looked it up.
Low and behold! The bill introduced in January 2019 was “Middle Class Health Benefits Tax Repeal Act of 2019” Surprise! Surprise!
What clued me off?
Well first off. Everyone should have a working knowledge of our legislatures both state and federal. You should know how a bill becomes law.
Lets go back a couple of steps. How do find a bill in your legislatures? For Congress it is “Congress.gov” and for Connecticut it is “cga.ct.gov” It also has the full history of the bill including all the testimony on the bill.
So when I went to congress.gov for H.R. 748 the first thing that I notice was that there were five summaries so that probably meant five version of the bill.
Bills have a crazy life. Some are introduced as placeholders, in other-words they don’t know the language of the bill so they make something up before the time for introducing a bill ends, for an example the CT Judiciary Committee for the 2020 session was February 7th. So a lot of times the bills get rewritten in committee, an example is in 2019 SB 388 was an intersex bill that was almost entirely changed by the time it made it out of committee. This is the proposed bill and this is the bill that made it out of committee.
Sometimes bills get merged or incorporated into another bill. In 2019 I was following a bill that affected the LGBTQ community and it died in the House… whew! But then a lobbyist friend said not so fast the bill got incorporated in another bill which passed and that is how I ended up on a legislative committee.
Other times the bill doesn’t make it out of committee and you can’t relax because it might come back to life as an amendment.
As I said it is important that you understand the workings of our legislators, on the Facebook page that the video was posted on got some very heavy comments, there were some people who were falling for the conspiracy theory.
This morning I have a conference call with a lawyer and a student from Harvard law school for a debriefing on a case we worked on for the Amicus Curiae brief for the Commission on Human Rights and Opportunity (CHRO) for the Declaratory Ruling on October 31, 2019 Petition Regarding Health Insurers’ Categorization of Certain Gender Confirming Surgeries as Cosmetic last month. That was the case where they found that insurance cannot discriminate against trans people.
Update 12:45
From the meeting we learned that the defendant only has a few more weeks to appeal the decision.
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