ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, March 8, 1996 TAG: 9603080100
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C3 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: RICHMOND
SOURCE: ROBERT LITTLE STAFF WRITER
For a few hours Thursday, a bill requiring parental notification for minors who want abortions seemed sure to become law.
And Botetourt Sen. Malfourd "Bo" Trumbo was either the man to thank or the man to blame, depending on whom you asked.
The state Senate tagged the parental notification idea onto another bill on the chamber floor Thursday, circumventing the committee that had killed it twice this year already. But first, members had to overrule Lt. Gov. Don Beyer's decision that it couldn't be done that way because the bill and notification were unrelated.
The vote to overrule Beyer passed 20-19, and would have failed if it had been a tie. But it couldn't have been a tie, with only 39 members in the room. Trumbo, distraught over the vote, had decided to walk away.
"In all honesty, I did not sleep last night," said Trumbo, who knew that skipping the vote would likely ensure Senate passage of parental notification. "I still don't know if it was the right way to do it. Probably not."
Trumbo likes parental notification, and voted for its final passage. But he also likes the chamber's standards of procedure, he said, and refused to vote against a ruling from Beyer, the Senate president. When the debate started, he left the chamber for about 45 minutes, spending time with his son, Tyler, who was visiting, along with classmates.
"It was the thought of losing the institutional integrity that bothered me," he said.
Later in the day, when it became clear parental notification wouldn't pass anyway, Del. Richard Cranwell, D-Roanoke County, joked that Trumbo ought to lose a day's pay for purposely lightening his workload.
"You didn't earn your per diem today," Cranwell told Trumbo on the House floor.
LENGTH: Short : 42 lines KEYWORDS: GENERAL ASSEMBLY 1996by CNB