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sideration given to the matters that were
going through at a terrific pace and in gi-
gantic volume. Speaker Marvin Mandel of
the House had introduced, and there was
passed by the General Assembly, a consti-
tutional amendment for submission to the
people that has become known as the Man-
del Plan.
This simply means that one house of the
legislature may consider and pass, and the
other house may consider but may not pass,
legislation relating to appropriations. In
other words, all work does not stop, every-
thing is not stymied.
We adopted the Mandel Plan, which had
been approved by the people overwhelm-
ingly and is written in the constitution.
We have included that likewise in the
budget plan which we have presented.
Now, you will find another section deal-
ing with the right of the General Assembly
to require any person in any branch of the
state government, other than the governor,
to appear and testify. This has always been
in the constitution. It is a requirement
which jumps the barrier between the sepa-
rate departments of government.
It simply means what it says, that the
staff of each branch shall be required to
testify and present all of the facts that are
necessary.
However, the legislature could not re-
quire the governor as an individual to tes-
tify. There would be no problem with re-
spect to that situation that I can see.
Now, we come across something else that
most of you here will remember, the recent
tax bill, and I will not give you all the four
or five different names it has because I do
not know who is claiming authorship or
who is disclaiming it, but the gigantic tax
bill that went through the last session of
the General Assembly was declared uncon-
stitutional with respect to one aspect on
highly technical grounds.
That was because it included more than
one item and was in violation of the provi-
sion of the Constitution which limited each
supplementary appropriation bill to some
single work, object or purpose, and obvi-
ously when the legislature was providing
for a supplementary appropriation, it was
an impossible task to write individual sepa-
rate bills covering each particular single
work, object, or purpose.
This is something that has gone out a
long time ago, but there it was in the Con-
stitution, and the Court of Appeals in the
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decision that was handed down, said it was
in violation of the constitutional require-
ments.
It required then a special session of the
General Assembly to cure it. We are curing
it in this way. Any other appropriation is
embodied in a separate bill, which is called
a supplementary appropriations bill, the
purpose or purposes of which shall be
clearly defined therein.
Now, what we are saying is that the
purposes shall be defined in the bill, but
there is no longer a requirement that it be
a single object or single work or a single
purpose.
This is archaic, and anachronistic, and
there is no reason for having this in the
constitution. You cannot pass a supple-
mentary appropriation bill until the budget
is out of the way. When the budget is
passed, the legislature can proceed to act
smoothly with respect to its work.
Now, some of you may notice that if the
legislature passes a supplementary appro-
priation bill that the governor has the
right on a line basis to veto that particular
appropriation.
You may be looking for it in this article.
It is not here, because it is in the section
already approved by this Convention deal-
ing with the executive department which
Delegate Morgan presented so well here in
the recent past.
It is there in the sections which orig-
inally were numbered 4.14 and 4.15, I
think, in the Commission draft. The execu-
tive's line veto on supplementary appro-
priations is of course retained.
There are two kinds of budgets that we
have. One deals with appropriations and
the other with capital expenditures. We
discussed capital expenditures yesterday,
where the state appropriates its full faith
and credit, but if the General Assembly
properly, legally and in timely fashion
seeks any form of a capital improvement
not called for by the governor's capital
budget, they have a right by supplementary
capital budget appropriation to provide for
such an expenditure. This is the difference.
Up until what was adopted here, you would
have a separate tax provision, usually a
real estate tax, to call for the payment of
the principal and interest yearly as they
become due on these bond issues.
Since we are now departing from that
kind of a measure of providing for pay-
ment, we now say that if the supplemen-
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