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Committee chair rules multiple appropriation amendments out of order amid repeated challenges
Summary
During a Committee of the Whole session on the FY‑27 substitute budget, the chair repeatedly ruled appropriation amendments out of order, prompting several motions to overrule that were put to a hand vote and failed; senators pressed for reasons and raised concerns about consistency and the treatment of lapse funds.
The Committee of the Whole opened its FY‑27 substitute‑budget markup with the chair reading a detailed set of rules of engagement, including deadlines for submitting written amendments and limits on yielding time. Early in the session the chair declared a set of appropriation amendments out of order for the chapter being considered and said those items would be handled instead in the bill's miscellaneous provisions.
A senator (speaker 2) repeatedly challenged that ruling and argued one amendment met the stated requirements — identifying a funding source and explaining impacts — and presented text to appropriate $20,000,000 from FY‑2026 unaudited excess revenues to refurbish the former Manila public health clinic. The senator said nurses and the acting public‑health administrator had told the committee the clinic was critically needed, especially for pregnant women and children, and linked the proposal to Guam's high infant‑mortality rate.
The chair replied that the amendment was an outright appropriation and therefore out of place in the current chapter, and she sustained objections, repeatedly instructing the clerk to consider the items in miscellaneous provisions. Multiple senators moved to overrule the chair's ruling; the chair called for hands votes on those motions and announced that each motion failed. The transcript records a sequence of similar motions and failed attempts to overrule the chair before the committee moved on.
Several senators argued the chair's rulings were inconsistent with earlier precedent — citing earlier appropriations that had been accepted in similar circumstances — and invoked Mason's Manual to press that points of order raised at the time must be addressed. The chair responded that she had conferred with the Speaker and that her rulings were consistent with the rules she had read at the start of the session.
The procedural fight consumed substantial floor time and became a focal point for senators who said the rulings limited debate on policy priorities and the committee's ability to consider amendments in the order they were received. The chair maintained that the committee would retain order and that only a successful motion to overrule would change her rulings.
The committee did not adopt any of the amendments while the chair was ruling them out of order; instead, the chair placed them in the miscellaneous provisions for later consideration. The session then proceeded through the planned agenda to agency budget reviews. The committee recessed for lunch with those procedural disputes unresolved and the listed amendments intact in the miscellaneous provisions.
The session record shows the formal motions to overrule the chair were put to hands votes and declared to have failed; no roll‑call tallies are recorded in the transcript portion provided.
