Among the four bills currently on the conference committee list is House Bill 1268, a bill which passed both chambers pretty easily, but in differing versions.
The original House version came from Rep. Elizabeth May (R-27/Kyle), who wanted to increase openness and participation in the Legislative process by allowing legislators to start filing bills on July 1 in odd-numbered years and in mid-November, after completion of the official general election canvass, in even-numbered years. Currently legislators can’t prefile bills until 30 days before the beginning of Session.
In the Senate, Senator Reynold Nesiba (D-15/Sioux Falls) moved to amend HB 1268 with one small addition, a three-bill limit. On the floor last Wednesday, Senator Nesiba expressed the fear that legislators might pump out more bills than the public could keep track of and said a three-bill limit would help legislators focus the public’s attention on their most important proposals.
Senator Stace Nelson (R-19/Fulton) noted that no other committee of state agency has a limit on the number of bills it can prefile and thus opposed placing such a unique limit on legislators themselves. He said he didn’t see the earlier prefiling date “aggravating any problems” and instead would allow legislators to spread out their bill load instead of having ideas crushed in the rush of Session.
Senator Troy Heinert (D-26/Mission) said legislators could come up with “an idea a day” and create an “onslaught of legislation” that would overwhelm the Legislature.
Senator Nesiba’s amendment passed by a whisker, 18–16. Then, with no hard feelings, the Senate passed HB 1268 as amended unanimously.
Right now, the prefiling statute, SDCL 2-7-4, places no limit on how many bills a legislator may prefile. I’m not aware of any legislator who prefiled a bill a day for the current 30-day prefiling period. The vast majority of bills in the hopper before Session were from interim committees and the Executive Branch.
The only existing restrictions on what legislators can file are in Joint Rule 6B-3. Legislators may prime-sponsor up to four concurrent resolutions, three of which must be filed before the ninth Legislative day. Legislators can file as many bills as they want through the twelfth day of Session; they may only introduce three more during the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth days. The fifteenth day is the last day a legislator may introduce any bill or resolution… but clever and popular legislators may sneak new measures in by hoghouse after that.
The three-bill limit seems unnecessary: no legislator appears to be gunning to swamp the hopper with a hundred or even ten bills filed before Christmas.
The three-bill limit also seems counterproductive: even if some ambitious legislator does come up with a bushel of bills, HB 1268’s earlier deadline should help the Legislative Research Council review those bills sooner and clear the decks before Session starts. It would certainly help us bloggers and other interested parties review them, provide input, decide which ones are worth rallying for and which ones are worth waging war against. The three-bill limit makes life harder for everyone: the ambitious legislators has to sit on most of her agenda until she gets to Pierre on the second Tuesday of January; LRC gets swamped with bills in January; and journalists, activists, and fellow legislators don’t get a chance to see those bills until everything is happening at once.
Legislators already have unlimited bill introduction for a month and a half, and they’ve policed themselves reasonably well, with very few legislators prime-sponsoring more than a dozen substantive bills and resolutions. We don’t appear to need a cap on how many bills they can file.
Senators Nelson, Nesiba, and Cronin join Representatives May, Dennert, and Lesmeister on the HB 1268 conference committee. This conference shouldn’t take long: drop the three-bill limit and move this otherwise fine and dandy measure for openness and public deliberation to its final votes.