Pick up a flower, assuming you have any after this dry summer. Begin picking off the petals and with each one, alternate between “there will be a special session next week” and “there won’t be a special session next week.”

Signs as of today, according to the Magic 8-ball that is my brain, point to no. Speaking Friday with House Speaker Roger Hanshaw, R-Clay, he is skeptical but keeping his options open.

“At this point, we have not received a call and at this point I’m not necessarily expecting one for August,” Hanshaw said. “That could change on a dime though.”

But Del. Mike Pushkin, the chairman of the West Virginia Democratic Party, pointed to a letter received by lawmakers from legislative leadership at the end of last week that a special session will not happen in August. He was none too happy about it, leveling criticisms at Gov. Jim Justice and Republican legislative leaders in a press release Friday.

“The Governor’s inability to organize his party and reach an agreement with legislative leaders is a clear failure of leadership,” said Pushkin, D-Kanawha “It’s time for Governor Justice and the Republican leadership to stop making excuses and start taking action. If Jim Justice can’t build consensus with the party he leads in West Virginia, how can we expect him to accomplish anything as 1 of 100 in the United States Senate? The people of West Virginia deserve better.”

Frankly, it won’t be big news if Justice calls a special session to coincide with August legislative interim meetings this Sunday. The news will be if we get to Sunday or even the end of interims next Tuesday and he doesn’t.

Well, Justice definitely won’t call a special session a week from Tuesday, as that is the day his historic Greenbrier Resort is supposed to be auctioned off on the courthouse steps in Lewisburg. Assuming that auction isn’t stopped by the courts, Justice is going to be distracted that day.

Justice has been asked nearly every other week since the end of the May special session about if he will call an August special session and what will be included on that special session proclamation. He proposed a possible special session for August or later in the fall.

“It’s just tough to get everybody corralled up … it’s like herding cats,” Justice said. “We’ve got plenty of time, but we’ve just got to get it done and get everyone together and everything.”

I wish I understood the urgency from my fellow media members for an answer about the possible special session. Since Justice took office in 2017, he has never given much of a heads up to reporters or even lawmakers about when special sessions will be.

There has been at least once that the governor called a special session with just four hours of notice prior to the start of a legislative interim meeting, causing some lawmakers coming from far flung places, like Wheeling and the Eastern Panhandle, to put their feet on the accelerators and break some speed limits just to get in the State Capitol Building in time for the gavels to come down.

And while Justice sometimes provides some vague or broad explanations for what he intends to put on a special session call, most of the time reporters and lawmakers don’t see all the proposed bills until the proclamation comes out.

Sometimes negotiations between the Governor’s Office and legislative leadership on what to include on a special session call continues right up until the start of interims. Sometimes the special session call gets amended by the governor during the special session.

Justice waiting until the final hours to call a special session isn’t that interesting. What will be more interesting is if he doesn’t call a special session at all and what that says about his remaining four months as governor.

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For the special session Justice said he will call, there are only two specific items he keeps referring to: a 5% additional cut to personal income tax rates, and his proposal from the regular session for a tax break for child care.

I’ve already written in this column space recently why, even if he puts his personal income tax bill on a special session agenda, it won’t pass. In short: Lawmakers are happy with the trigger mechanism in place that uses a formula to cut personal income tax rates in a more measured way.

Republican lawmakers want to phase out the personal income tax, but they’re comfortable with the trigger formula. They’re also concerned about shaky personal income tax collections in July and possibly shaky collections for August, combined with concerns about future costs coming to state government that could make an additional 5% personal income tax cut hard to swallow.

Justice, whether he wins his U.S. Senate race or not, will not be here after December, but many lawmakers will be, and they don’t want to clean up any mess he might leave behind.

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As for the Governor’s child care tax credit, it sounds nice, but advocates point out that it still places the burden on families to front the costs of child care upfront.

The child care tax credit proposal — as introduced on behalf of Justice during the 2024 legislative session — would provide a credit against the personal income tax in the amount of 50% of the allowable federal child and dependent care credit, effective retroactively to Jan. 1. But you have to already be getting the federal child care tax break and you have to be able to afford these services in order to get the credit a year later.

As I wrote about in my weekend feature, the immediate problem is this $23 million childcare subsidy cliff the state will drive right over if DoHS doesn’t shift money around to cover the change in federal formula from an attendance-based model to an enrollment-based model.

But you don’t need a special session to do that by supplemental appropriation. DoHS has the authority to move its own funds around to cover that $23 million child care funding cliff in the short-term. The Legislature and the next governor will need to incorporate those future costs into the general revenue budget for the next fiscal year though.

So, is there even a need for a special session at all? That just depends on whether you think DoHS can move money around or if you’d rather see lawmakers appropriate available surplus tax collections to cover those costs.