Sen. Landske’s SB 10 would require massage therapists to be licensed instead of merely provide for certification.

In the world of licensure regulation, there are three basic levels: license, certification, and registration. Registration does not typically require any particular credentials or training and the fact that you are registered does not necessarily mean that you are qualified; the State just wants to know who you are and that you are engaged in a particular activity.

Certification offers what amounts to a seal of approval. Under a certification regime, you can engage in an activity regardless of whether you are certified, but you can’t call yourself a Certified Whatever unless you have the certification. This offers the consumer some general assurance that someone who is certified meets some minimum standards. The consumer theoretically knows he or she is taking their chances if they go to someone who is not certified.

Licensure prohibits engaging in the activity at all if you don’t jump through the licensure hoops. This means that someone who doesn’t prove to the State that they meet the minimum standards is not allowed to engage in the particular activity.

Sen. Landske’s bill would move massage therapists out of the certification structure and into a licensure structure. The bill would also preempt local governments from imposing their own massage therapy regulations.

SB 8 is legislation Sen. Boots has been pushing for awhile. (See, e.g., 2009 and 2011.)

As it currently stands, judges who mandate that local government pay more to support the trial court get to hire private counsel to represent them and then the county that wanted to spend less on the judiciary gets stuck with the judge’s legal bill on top of usually losing the mandate litigation. Sen. Boots idea is to require the attorney general to represent the judges — which makes some sense when one considers that judges are regarded as state officials.

In past years, this bill has been referred to the judiciary committee and never heard from again.

SB 7, introduced by Sen. Tomes, requires a property insurer to give a premium discount for an owner occupied residence with a metal roof. “The amount of a discount . . . must reflect the cost savings the insurer expects to realize in insuring property that has a metal roof.”

I guess I don’t have any particular opposition to insurers giving discounts for metal roofs, but it’s one of those oddly specific pieces of legislation that makes me wonder what the back story might be. I suspect that there are lots of other potential structural variables that could reduce risk to a building; so why single out metal roofs for special treatment?

Sen. Head has introduced SB 5, concerning consumer legal funding. This is meant to regulate transactions in which an outside business provides litigation funding for a natural person in exchange for a contingent interest in the outcome of the litigation.

The bill requires consumer legal funding companies to be registered in Indiana. It requires the contract to provide certain funding information and to allow the contract to be rescinded within 30 days of the funding date (provided the funds are remitted to the company.) It also requires a provision that waives the company’s right to control the litigation – leaving that right to the plaintiff and the plaintiff’s attorney. It further gives attorney’s fees, health provider liens, and subordination agreements priority over the consumer legal funding contingency agreement.

It makes violation of the requirements a deceptive consumer act, actionable by the attorney general.

I was pretty excited (because I’m a nerd) to see that some of the 2012 bills were listed at the LSA website. Unfortunately, the text is not yet available.

But, to give you a taste, here are some of the bill descriptions listed there:

SB 0002 — Miami Nation tribal recognition.
SB 0005 — Funding of lawsuits.
SB 0006 — Knives with automatic blades.
SB 0007 — Insurance premium discount for metal roof.
SB 0008 — Representation of judges in mandate litigation.
SB 0011 — Animal fighting contests.
SB 0012 — Reestablishment of FSSA.
SB 0016 — Boat and other watercraft liens.
SB 0017 — Summary dissolution decree.
SB 0018 — Duty to support a child.
SB 0020 — Alcoholic beverages.
SB 0021 — Coverage for smoking cessation drugs.
SB 0022 — Conservancy district director compensation.
SB 0023 — Confined feeding operations near state parks.
SB 0027 — State highway closings.
SB 0028 — Annual review of unpaid restitution orders.
SB 0029 — Employer purchased insurance.
SB 0030 — Limitation on adoption of agency rules.
SB 0031 — Grants from military family relief fund.
SB 0034 — Confidential public pension information.
SB 0035 — Definition of child care ministry.

Tom LoBianco, writing for the Associated Press, is reporting that Sen. Jean Leising of Oldenburg and Rep. Heath VanNatter of Kokomo intend to introduce legislation requiring welfare recipients to submit to drug tests and pass them as a condition of receiving benefits.

I might be able to get behind this if it’s accompanied by an amendment requiring legislators to pass a breathalyzer test before casting votes. A lot of the evening votes would fail for a lack of a quorum, and a handful of legislators would never be able to cast a vote.

According to Leising and VanNater:

They say Hoosiers scrapping for paychecks shouldn’t have to pay welfare costs of drug abusers.

Their rationale, however, is negated by the experience of Florida with such a law where 96% of applicants pass the test, 2% fail, and 2% refuse to take the test.

So, you invade the privacy of people with the bad sense to be poor only to catch the 2% of that population who are abusing drugs and drive away another 2% who may or may not be for savings that are minimal, at best; most likely a wash; and which might end up being a loss once you get the drug users out of the system.

And then there is the small point that children of drug users should probably be allowed to eat and get health care even though they showed poor judgment when choosing their parents. At some point, lawmakers are going to have to come to terms with the fact morality plays shouldn’t be confused for sound legislation.

I’ve covered the “Right to Work” ground pretty thoroughly in the recent past, so I won’t go on about it too much here. I just want to note for posterity that it has been declared the top legislative priority by Republicans in the General Assembly.

To recap: “right to work” does not give workers any rights. It impairs the right of a union and an employer to enter into a particular kind of collective bargaining agreement and the right of an employer to set union membership (or dues equivalent) as a condition of employment.

Having this as a “top” priority reminds me of back in the day (2004, if memory serves) when banning marriage equality was the “top” priority. It’s probably a bad sign when one side’s top legislative priority is poking the other side in the eye.

Tom Lobianco has an article about whether Gov. Daniels and the General Assembly will take up a right to work (for less) bill in the 2012 session. The article makes it sound like the Governor will go passive on this issue like he has in the past. It seems to be one of those things that he isn’t going to spearhead, but if his party sees fit to proceed, he won’t stand in the way either.

The perniciously named “right to work” is a misnomer. What the law really does is use government authority to prohibit a certain kind of contract. As it stands now, employers and employees have the freedom to enter into a contract whereby one of the conditions of employment is that employees join a union or, at least, pay some equivalent of union dues so they are not tempted to be free riders, receiving union benefits without paying for them. So, it’s a contractual provision that is currently permitted but not required. “Right to work” is a limitation on this freedom to contract. The General Assembly tells employers that they are not permitted to make union membership a condition of employment.

This is typically dressed up as championing the rights of future employees who might not want to join a union as a condition of employment; but the oddity is that typically the advocates of this restriction on contracts are, in other contexts, champions of absolute freedom to contract and could rarely care less what a potential employee thinks about the conditions of employment set by an employer. (Don’t like that condition of employment? Fine, go work somewhere else.) But, when union membership comes up, horrors! Conditions that are pro-union or anti-gun are off the table, but pretty much anything else goes.

So, it looks as if the Republicans in the General Assembly will try to shove this one through, Gov. Daniels will be generally supportive, but a little distant, the Democrats will fight it tooth and nail – probably with another walkout if necessary; and, we’ll see in the 2012 elections whether it was worth the effort for either side. Unions are taking heart in the reaction to anti-union legislation in Ohio which got destroyed when put to a popular vote (Gov. Daniels’ support for Gov. Kasich in that campaign notwithstanding.)

I’ll throw out one more note of caution:

Mitch Roob, then Daniels’ economic development chief, told the study committee that “right to work” was needed to bring jobs to the state.

Roob’s track record in state government has been such that, if he is for something, the smart money should probably be against it.