Now for some statistical Legis-trivia:
The 2026 Legislature passed 241 bills (just bills, not resolutions), 42.2% of the 571 bills filed. Only one has been vetoed so far (House Bill 1077, the attempt to declare cell-cultivated protein to be adulterated food, which veto the Governor made up for by signing Senate Bill 124, a five-year moratorium on making, selling, or distributing test-tube meat). The Governor has the next couple weeks to augment that veto count.
The 2025 Legislature passed 211 out of 489 bills filed, a pass rate of 43.1%.
The 2026 House originated 326 bills. 122 of those House bills made it to the Governor’s desk, a pass rate of 37.4%. That’s down slightly from last year, when 104 of 269 House Bills made it to the Governor, a 38.7% pass rate.
The 2026 Senate produced 245 bills, 119 of which passed both chambers. The Senate’s 48.6% pass rate matched last year’s when 107 of their 220 bills went to the Second Floor, again 48.6%. This year’s Senate thus improved its superiority over the House’s pass rate from 9.9 percentage points to 11.1.
The House has 70 members. The Senate has 35, but in 2026, it functionally had 34, since Republican Senator Arch Beal didn’t show up for work a single day this Session, leaving District 12 without a voice in this year’s Senate.
Even though the 2026 House proposed 33% more bills than the Senate, present members of the Senate filed an average of 7.2 bills, while House members filed an average of 4.6 bills. Per-member bill productivity was 55% higher for Senators than for Representatives. 3.5 Senate bills passed per present member; only 1.7 House Bills per member made it through both chambers. So by successful passage through both chambers, Senators were more than twice as productive as Representatives.
Per-member productivity by bills filed and bills passed was up in both chambers over 2025, suggesting that after a year of working together, this group of legislators got a little better at writing and passing bills.
But if this talk of bill productivity by chamber and member means anything (and it’s a blustery Sunday, and I’m just playing with numbers over breakfast, so probably not, but I’m rolling!), we have to ask whether legislators were doing their own work. No, I don’t mean figuring out how many bills Al Novstrup had ChatGPT write for him—none of the seven House bills filed by the Legislature’s current longest-serving member survived first committee. I just mean separating bills originating with legislators themselves, either individually or from committees, from the bills requested by the Executive Branch.
Click through the Legislative Research Council’s custom bill reports, and you’ll find 96 of this year’s 571 bills were requested by the Governor, the Attorney General, the Department of Public Safety, the Chief Justice, and other agencies outside the Legislature. The Legislature passed 85 of those 96 bills, a remarkable 89% pass rate. That success rate beat last year’s 81% of agency bills passing both chambers.
Agency bills generally enjoy a high success rate. The Attorney General went ten for ten this Session and six for seven last year. The Department of Agriculture and Natural Resources got all seven of its bills this year and all four last year. The only outside requestor with a losing record with the current Legislature is the Secretary of State, who saw the Legislature reject four of her seven bills this year and five of six last year.
36 of this year’s agency-requested bills started in the House; 60 were filed in the Senate. Take them out, and the Legislature considered only 475 bills of its own creation, 290 in the House, 185 in the Senate.
The Legislature passed only 156 of its own bills, a 32.8% pass rate for bills not requested by higher—excuse me, separate but equal—powers.
Take out the agency bills, more of which agencies launched in the Senate than in the House, and the performance gap between chambers narrows. House members saw 90 of their 290 home-grown (native? non-agency? chamber-made?) bills reach the Governor’s desk, a 31.0% success rate. Without the agency bills, the Senate’s success rate was only a bit better: 35.7%, 66 bills out of 185 from their own members.
Agency bills also inflated the Senate’s per-member productivity more than the House’s. Remove requests from the Governor, A.G., et al. from the hopper, and each Senator generated an average of 5.4 bills, compared to 4.1 bills generated by each Representative. Per-member passage rates for non-agency bills were 1.9 for Senators and 1.3 for Representatives.
On the whole, these data indicate that real Senate bills—bills proposed by Senators, not outside agencies—have a slightly better chance of reaching the Governor’s desk than real House bills. The Governor, Attorney General, and other officials who spend more time in Pierre than legislators may have noticed that advantage, and that may be one reason they send the majority of their bill requests to the Senate.