As the Legislature nears the halfway point of the general session, bills are starting to drop like flies. The carnage is exposing some fault lines between freshman and veteran lawmakers over both the content of the bills, and the lawmaking process itself.
Chris Clements: This is the Cheyenne Roundup, a weekly look at Wyoming’s legislative session, from Wyoming Public Radio and WyoFile. I'm Chris Clements, Wyoming Public Radio's statehouse reporter, and with me is WyoFile’s state government and politics reporter, Maggie Mullen.
Maggie Mullen: Hey Chris. Good to be here in the Wyoming Capitol’s media room.
CC: Yessiree bobcat tail, it’s 9 a.m. on Friday, Feb. 7. This past Thursday was the halfway point in the general session, and the Legislature is starting to hit a bunch of deadlines. For instance, we’re passing a deadline for bills to clear committee in their chamber of origin. You can sort of feel it in the air that we’ve reached the halfway point, too. Lately, lawmakers have been showing up to work sick. House Speaker Chip Neiman (R-Hulett) pointed that out.
Chip Neiman: Somebody said it sounds like we’re in an ER in here. People are hacking and gagging and choking and carrying on.
MM: Really, it has been a challenge avoiding the crud in this building. But the legislative process marches ahead. And this coming week, bills must clear first, second and third votes in their full chamber of origin in order to stay alive.
A reminder for the folks at home: A bill has to go through the entire process in both chambers. So introduction, committee, three readings and then onto the governor’s desk.
CC: We’re smack-dab in the week of carnage. It’s like that movie, “Kill Bill.” It’s exposing some faultlines – old guard versus new guard lawmakers, and of course the content of the bills themselves. Not only are there differences with veterans’ versus newcomers’ priorities, there’s also different ideas about how the process should work.
We’ll get into all that. But a lot of the policy deaths we’re seeing is because of Speaker Neiman’s desk drawer, as you reported in a story this week, Maggie.
MM: Correctamundo, Chris. The speaker’s drawer isn’t an actual drawer in a desk. Instead, it’s the lingo used to describe the speaker’s unilateral prerogative to hold back bills. The body can override the speaker, but that requires a two-thirds vote.
CC: Right, so here’s our Civics 101 for the week. Before we get into death by mahogany drawer, let’s go over a few ways bills can die.
MM: A bill can fail on a vote, whether that’s in committee or on the floor. Or lawmakers just don’t get to them by a certain deadline, like we’re seeing today with bills trying to get out of committee. Then there’s the bucket of bills that die because of the speaker’s prerogative.
CC: As you reported, speakers have always left some bills to die on the vine. But Maggie, I think you’re saying that this session, that’s happening more than average.
MM: It’s at least more than the last two general sessions. As far as I know, most speakers have held back bills.
But the drawer took on controversy during the last two years when the Freedom Caucus was really critical of former House Speaker Albert Sommers for keeping bills back. But I found in my own reporting that this year, Neiman held back 95 bills, which accounted for more than a quarter of all House bills. For comparison, Sommers held back about 8% two years ago. So this year is a much higher proportion of House bills than under the last two speakers during a general session.
CC: He had 95 bills, but a desire to bring them all to the floor ain’t one.
MM: Last fall, ahead of the general election, Neiman said he would use the drawer on a case by case basis. But he also hoped that every piece of legislation could get past introduction, so lawmakers could debate. When I spoke to him, he chalked it up to multiple different issues: lengthy debate, dozens of brand new lawmakers and trying to hit the Freedom Caucus’s Five and Dime Plan bills early, which he called “heavy lifts.”
Chip Neiman: Judge us based on the content of what we got through.
CC: So definitely an uptick in dead bills. They varied in subject, sponsorship and complexity.
MM: Most were from individual lawmakers. Fourteen were sponsored by legislative committees. Those dealt with a range of issues. Some were related to housing, education, corner crossing and property taxes. Others had to do with elections, irrigation districts and Wyoming’s burgeoning gaming industry.
Some of the lawmakers I spoke to were particularly concerned about the number of committee bills coming to such an abrupt end after being worked in the offseason.
CC: I’ve been hearing similar concerns. Lawmakers spend time crafting those bills during the off-season like you said, or the interim. Our Legislature only meets for a fraction of the year, but interim committees gavel in all year round, all across the state. That way, members of the public, agency heads and other interested parties can field lawmakers ideas for legislation that’s already in the works or that could be.
Some of those ideas end up becoming bill drafts. Some go nowhere. But the vetting process requires time and taxpayer money, so in return those bills are traditionally prioritized during sessions over measures sponsored by individual lawmakers.
But in recent years, a bunch of new faces, coupled with the retirement of some well-known ones, has meant the process is changing. Rep. Steve Harshman (R-Casper) told me that after I caught up with him outside the House lobby.
Steve Harshman: Usually, the House operates like the Senate: You bring the noncontroversial, the easy fixes, the committee-type bills first. Most of these bills are little problems that a constituent has brought to us, and they’re pretty simple fixes. Boy, you can knock out 40 things right away in the first week that benefit the people and solve a problem and are noncontroversial.
CC: He said that’s not the strategy being used this year.
MM: Or last year or the year before that. We first started to see this in the 2023 general session. I wrote a story back then about six committee bills dying when Neiman, the majority floor leader at the time, buried them at the bottom of the general file.
Then last year, I reported on the Freedom Caucus using its voting bloc to kill 13 committee bills on day one, when two-thirds support was needed. This year, House leadership is simply not prioritizing committee bills.
CC: The conflict here is pretty fascinating to me. Either you play ball and prioritize committee bills the way it’s often been done, the way I think some folks would argue works best and is most respectful to taxpayer dollars – or you buck that trend. We’ve got some newcomers this year who think of themselves more as disruptors. It’s hard to say with 100% certainty that one method is objectively better than the other.
So Maggie, I’m curious what you’ve heard from lawmakers about these committee bills going the way of the Dodo bird. South with the geese.
CC: For some lawmakers that I’ve spoken to, it’s becoming a question of — what’s the point of the interim? What’s the point of committees meeting in the off-season to craft bills, spend taxpayer dollars and stakeholder resources if the Legislature is just going to kill those bills from the jump?
That’s something I heard from Minority Floor Leader Mike Yin (D-Jackson) at a press conference on Tuesday. I also spoke with Sen. Cale Case (R-Lander). He’s a Republican and the chairman of the Senate Corporations Committee. Four of that committee’s bills died in the speaker’s drawer.
That was a disappointment for Case but also a source of confusion. These were what Case called “no brainer” bills. One would have created reporting requirements for insurance fraud. Another would have updated the bidding requirements for irrigation districts.
One other lawmaker I’ll mention is Rep. Trey Sherwood (D-Laramie). She’s a Democrat and a House Appropriations Committee member. She told me that committee dedicated a lot of time and resources this offseason to hearing public testimony and crafting bills for Wyoming’s gaming industry. That was a heavy interim lift, but was meant to create some uniformity in the regulatory framework and protections for the public. And again, those four committee bills died in the speaker’s drawer.
CC: Huh. But the mass culling that happened in the House doesn’t seem to be happening in the Senate.
MM: No, it doesn’t. Senate Pres. Bo Biteman (R-Ranchester) introduced and referred all 208 Senate files to committees. I haven’t gotten a chance to speak with the president about this, but Case commended Biteman for doing so.
CC: There’s also fewer newbies in that chamber. In the House, there’s 23 first-time legislators, and that’s having an impact on the process of lawmaking, something I reported on this week.
Longtime lawmakers like Rep. Lloyd Larsen (R-Lander) say they’re lending a hand to help educate freshmen on procedures and history. Larsen is a 12 year veteran of the House.
Lloyd Larsen: When we get up and talk and debate a bill, it’s like having your teenager in the car and teaching them to drive. There’s just some experience [issues]: They’re going into the turns too fast, they’re not stopping at the stop signs. There’s an education process that we all have to go through.
CC: On some bills, Larsen says his veteran status allows him to point to similar legislation that previously failed and share context.
MM: Right, that’s something my colleague Andrew Graham has been noticing. He’s got a unique way of seeing the Legislature since he returned to the state after being away for a few years. The Freedom Caucus was not in charge when he was a reporter here before. So he asked House leadership at a press conference last week about the role of lawmakers like Larsen, as well as Republican veterans like Reps. Steve Harshman and Bob Nicholas (R-Cheyenne).
CC: But Speaker Neiman says even though he appreciates the intent, all that “educating” is slowing things down. Neiman has been in the House for four years.
Chip Neiman: It's called a filibuster, if we want to just get right down to it. But that's all part of the process.
CC: Neiman’s view is that the longer floor debate goes on, the less bills will survive as a host of key deadlines near, including priority legislation for the Freedom Caucus.
But Harshman says what he and other legislators are doing isn’t intended to delay or kill bills. It’s vetting.
Steve Harshman: I’m not going to sit there and watch all of this go without saying something. That's not what I was elected to do.
MM: Bills have also been dying because committees or chambers are voting them down. For example, I was keeping my eye on two mirror bills to ban all electronic voting equipment, so replacing the machines with hand counting all ballots. So a big, big change to Wyoming’s election systems and something the state Republican party has been interested in.
But both of those bills died after some very long committee meetings, one of which went late into the night this week. There’s a slim chance they could be resurrected, and that’s true for any piece of failed legislation. In fact, we’ve already seen a couple zombie bills this session.
CC: I was surprised to see the Medical Ethics Defense act die. It would’ve allowed hospitals and physicians to decline providing medical care, like abortion, if it conflicts with their religious or moral beliefs. We’re seeing quite a few of the other abortion restrictions clear important hurdles in both chambers, so I expected the same to be true for this bill.
Maggie: Let’s end on what’s still alive. What’re you watching, Chris?
CC: I’ll be watching a bunch of these bills banning transgender folks from bathrooms, public spaces and certain sports teams. And I’ll be keeping an eye on election bills, like one that would require hand count audits of some elections, and another that would ban all ballot drop boxes. And of course, how President Trump’s executive orders play into all that. And you Maggie?
MM: The budget — how far apart will the Senate and the House land?
CC: We’ll be back next Friday with updates.
Thanks for listening to the Cheyenne Roundup, your weekly look at what lawmakers are up to during the 2025 legislative session from Wyoming Public Radio and WyoFile. New episodes drop every Friday throughout the session.
Editing and producing by Tennessee Watson and Nicky Ouellet. Follow our ongoing legislative coverage at wyomingpublicmedia.org and wyofile.com. And thanks again for listening.
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