Nebraska lawmakers headed home Wednesday after wrapping up their 2012 session. Gov. Dave Heineman may be among those glad to see them go. It was a rough session for the governor generally — and lawmakers handed him a couple of big defeats before leaving town.

Senators overrode his veto of a bill providing publicly funded prenatal care for the unborn babies of illegal immigrants. They also overrode his veto of a bill allowing cities to raise sales taxes by up to one-half cent with voter approval. Heineman fought intense, public battles against both measures but failed to sway more than a couple votes.

The governor prevailed on two other vetoes — one of a bill that would have allowed gambling on old horse races and one of a little-noticed measure that would have provided startup grants for school-based health clinics. But Heineman did not make such a public effort on either and support for the health clinic bill had been soft.

The governor fared little better the rest of the session. His major initiative of the year was a package of individual and corporate income tax cuts along with the elimination of the inheritance tax. It passed but only after getting pared back to less than half its original size.

Lawmakers snubbed two other ideas entirely – his plan to merge the departments of Labor and Economic Development and his proposal to transfer the youth rehabilitation and treatment centers from the Department of Health and Human Services to the Department of Correctional Services.

Meanwhile, lawmakers took the lead on fixing the state’s child welfare system after the administration’s experiment at privatization fell apart. The Legislature handed the governor his third override on a measure that paid child welfare providers who had been left in the lurch by one of the former private contractors. Lawmakers also stepped in on other executive branch issues, including the problems with the new call centers for handling food stamps, disability aid, Medicaid and other public benefits.

The governor didn’t lose them all, though. His influence helped shape the final budget measures and he worked with lawmakers to get several business tax incentive measures passed.

The end is in sight for the 2012 Legislature but it just got a little farther away. Speaker of the Legislature Mike Flood announced that he had moved the last day of the session to April 18, instead of Thursday. While Thursday had been listed as the last day on the session calendar, the calendar has an asterisk noting that the Speaker had reserved the right to make changes.

The change is all part of the end-of-session jousting between the governor and the Legislature. By law, the governor has five days (not counting Sundays) to sign or veto bills. If they are in session when a bill is vetoed, lawmakers can try to override a veto. But they have no recourse if the governor’s five days last beyond the end of the session. 

To avoid that “pocket veto” problem, legislative speakers in the past have gotten the governor to promise he would not use all five days and would send all bills back, signed or vetoed, by the last day of the session. This year, Flood said, the governor would not make a similar agreement. He said the governor cited the crush of bills at the end of the session for his decision to use all five days.

Yet Gov. Dave Heineman will have to sign or veto all but a handful of bills by Wednesday. Among the handful remaining is a measure that would provide publicly-funded prenatal care for the unborn babies of illegal immigrant women. Heineman should have no trouble making up his mind on that bill, given the all-out efforts he has made to defeat the measure and vilify those who support it. So why the delay? It gives him that much more time to crank up the political pressure on senators, who are expected to be taking up three override motions that day.

Crunch time has arrived for the Nebraska Legislature. The calendar shows only 10 more days in the session while 26 bills named as senator, committee or speaker priorities have yet to come up for debate for the first time. 

Some on the list are expected to consume hours of time – a measure to shrink the Omaha Public School board, a proposal to let cities raise sales taxes by a half-cent, a bill limiting cities’ ability to levy occupation taxes. And some awaiting second-round debate also could eat up the clock — legalizing gambling on historic horseraces, to name one.  

Every legislative session hits a point where the time available and the bills yet to be considered appear on a collision course. That was the point in the session when former Speaker of the Legislature Kermit Brashear always expressed frustration at questions about the seeming impossibility of getting through everything. “There will be time for everything that needs to get done,” was his typical response.

Most years there is. The looming deadline and a few legislative days that last well into the night and skillful scheduling by the Speaker usually do the trick. They produce compromises that speed bills along and make it possible to fit more into the time available. Meeting four days a week also helps give time for negotiations.

State Sen. Amanda McGill of Lincoln introduced a measure to get tougher on human sex trafficking in Nebraska but she missed the first-round debate and vote the bill Wednesday. The issue has been one of her priorities but it conflicted with an invitation to the White House for a belated St. Patrick’s Day celebration with President Barack Obama and Ireland’s Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Enda Kenny.

Invitees to the reception included a number of elected officials of Irish descent. McGill, who looks every bit the Irish lass with her red hair and fair skin, said she got the invitation because of her Irish heritage and her involvement with the Young Elected Officials Network, a group for moderate and progressive elected officials. She said she believes her Irish ancestors came to the United States sometime during the mid-1800s.

The prime minister gave Obama a bowl of shamrocks, a tradition dating back several administrations. Kenny also presented the president with a certificate acknowledging Obama’s Irish roots. McGill said the president joked he would hang next to his birth certificate. Obama’s birth certificate has, of course, has been the source of controversy among some people who question whether he was born in the United States.

The evening also featured music by Maryland Gov. Martin O’Mally’s Celtic rock band. McGill got a chance to meet the president in the receiving line. She encouraged him to visit Nebraska where, she reminded him, he got one enthusiastic electoral vote. He promised to try to make it back.

Ordinary citizens trying to follow legislative action might be pardoned if they get a little confused by the Nebraska Legislature’s daily agenda. Rather than a simple list of bills to be taken up in order, the agenda shows a multiplicity of bill “divisions.” Each division is identified a senator’s name and the order of divisions changes from day to day and week to week. It can be baffling for people trying to predict when lawmakers may debate a particular issue.

Here’s the explanation, from Speaker of the Legislature Mike Flood of Norfolk. Setting the daily agenda is one of the speaker’s key duties. Flood adopted the division method of scheduling from his predecessor, former Sen. Kermit Brashear of Omaha. Flood said the method makes good use of legislative time and energy. It allows lawmakers to alternate between easier issues and issues that generate long, often draining debate, while finishing each week with some accomplishments.

“It’s hard to put in three very difficult bills in a row,” he said. “The Legislature needs a chance to breathe.”

Typically divisions start with an easy bill, then work up in controversy level. Most are named for the introducer of the last bill in the division. Some divisions group bills with similar content, such as this year’s child welfare legislation, to allow for more focused debate.

Flood moves the divisions around each day after looking at a variety of factors, such as the expected length of debate and other items on lawmakers’ schedules. As the session moves on, he often puts divisions on the agenda to be taken up at a specific time. And if that time happens to be just before a major social event so lawmakers are eager to vote and get going? Well, a smart speaker uses every tool in the box to keep debate moving and get decisions made.

Grab your bad puns and saddle up for a long afternoon of debate Tuesday. Lawmakers will take up a measure that would allow people to bet on ”historic” horse racing. Sound strange, you say? Why would anyone gamble on a race that’s already happened?

Well, those placing the bets are not likely to know how any of the races turned out. They would choose from among 200,000 to 300,000 races stored in machines that resemble video lottery terminals. Bettors could get information about each horse’s past performance but not the names of the horses or the dates, places and times of the races.

Supporters say the idea is an expansion of already-legal simulcast racing and would support the state’s struggling live horse racing industry. The machines would be allowed only at licensed race tracks. Opponents say it amounts to “horse slots” and would turn those tracks into casinos.

Previous attempts to legalize the practice have stumbled over Nebraska’s historic wariness about gambling. Opponents are hoping for a repeat this year. Legislative opponents have filed 14 amendments, enough to ensure the debate will be prolonged.

State Sen. Mark Christensen of Imperial had a number of people doing a double-take this week during debate about child welfare. It happened in the middle of a speech, during which the senator had gotten wound up talking about problems in the system.

“I’m tired of bucking certain individuals,” he declared, going on to say he didn’t believe the bill in question would do enough to change the situation.

Only some listeners didn’t hear the word “bucking.” They heard a rhyming word beginning with the letter F. Others were uncertain what had just occurred. Eyebrows went up, tweets flew and some people called the Legislature to object.

For the record, though, Christensen did not drop the F-bomb on the floor of the Legislature. A review of the legislative recording confirms that he used a verb beginning with B.  “I would never state the other word in the Legislature,” he said. ”That’s not in my general vocabulary.”

Settle in for two days of debate about how Nebraska should fix its child welfare system. Nebraska lawmakers will take up five bills that represent the results of a months-long investigation into the state’s two-year experiment with child welfare privatization.

The first bill would set up a broad-based Nebraska Children’s Commission to develop a plan for child welfare and create an inspector general for child welfare position within the Legislature. The bill no longer calls for creating a separate children’s agency, but leaves that questions up to the commission. Other measures would boost pay for foster parents and improve reporting and data systems.

The most controversial may be the last measure, which would require the state to take back responsibility for managing child welfare cases statewide. State officials continue to argue against the bill, saying they want to continue with a privatized system in the Omaha area.

But some air went out of the opposition with last week’s announcement that the state’s contract with the Kansas-based KVC was ending and that state workers again would manage the majority of cases. Now we’ll see whether arguments made by state officials and the Nebraska Families Collaborative, which includes Boys Town as its major partner, can sway lawmakers.

The lawmaker leading efforts to refom Nebraska’s child welfare system has a personal stake in the system. It’s not an unusual situation in a part-time citizen Legislature, where most lawmakers have outside jobs.

But State Sen. Kathy Campbell’s long history of involvement with children’s and human service issues appears to have deflected most questions about conflicts of interest. She also took the rare step of taking leave without pay from her job this year.

Campbell has been executive vice president of the Cedars Home for Children Foundation, the fundraising arm of Cedars Youth Services, since 2003. Cedars was one of the private agencies that signed a contract with the state to take over coordination of child welfare cases. It was the first to drop its contract after Cedars officials decided they were losing too much money. 

In conflict of interest statements filed earlier this session, Campbell said she will vote on child welfare reform legislation “as it reflects comprehensive policy directions for the Nebraska system responsible for the safety of abused and neglected children.” She will not vote on any claim for reimbursement filed by Cedars against the state.

Campbell said she tries to focus on the children when working on child welfare issues. As chairwoman of the Health and Human Services Committee, she has led the investigation into the state’s two-year experiment with child welfare privatization and developed legislation aimed at improving the system.

 She  attributes her views on child welfare issues to the whole of her community involvement over the last 30 years, not her job of the last nine years. She began by helping get a statewide child abuse hotline started in the 1980s. She also has served on numerous boards and councils, including the Lancaster County Board, the Junior League of Lincoln, the United Way Women’s Leadership Council and the Nebraska Medicaid Reform Advisory Council.

Lawmakers have reached the halfway point of the 2012 Legislature and most of their time from here on out will be devoted to the bills named as priorities by individual senators, standing committees and the Speaker of the Legislature.

Tuesday’s agenda starts with an easy warmup – a bill allowing community college board to meet by videoconference or telephone conference call. Lawmakers may stretch their debate muscles a bit more on a measure giving smaller cities a year to plan for sales tax refunds due businesses that qualify for tax incentives. The measure’s $1.6 million price tag could hinder its advancement. 

Senators will have some heavier lifting on the next bill, which would require Nebraska children to stay in school until they reach age 18 or graduate, whichever comes sooner. The bill made it out of committee, but two of the eight senators voted against it. There likely will be more in the full Legislature who have some qualms about trying to force disaffected teenagers to stay in school.

Competing ideas for setting up a state health insurance exchange will be heard in the afternoon. Neither is expected to go anywhere this session, but the debate will shape Nebraska’s response to the federal health insurance reform law.