news-record.com

House Speaker Thom Tillis held his weekly briefing with reporters this morning. The headline: Tillis wants to avoid a conference committee on the budget.

Conference committees, for those who don’t know, are appointed when the House and Senate approve different version of the same bill. There are almost always differences over the budget … nobody actively covering the legislature right now can remember there NOT being a conference committee in the past 10 years.

Still, Tillis said that he hoped the House could push the Senate to take enough of House positions on the budget that the House could just accept whatever version of the budget the Senate passes.

“It would be one less point of failure, one less point of delay,” Tillis said.

Tillis made the case that 85 percent of the budget was based on things that the House and Senate had agreed to earlier in the year. There’s little reason, he said, to have a prolonged argument “around the margins.”

Color us scruffy media types skeptical. Even just 15 percent of difference in a $19.4 billion budget is still $4.85 billion worth of “discussion items” to argue over. Also, giving up the conference committee means giving up a chance to negotiate with the governor and avoid a veto showdown over the budget.