Aaron Sanderford
LINCOLN — Nebraska state senators set a self-imposed cap Friday on how many bills they can introduce.
In a 31-15 vote, the Legislature limited senators to proposing no more than 20 bills per senator per session, starting in 2025.
Part of the rule offered by State Sen. Ben Hansen of Blair also will limit legislative committees to proposing no more than 10 committee bills a year.
Hansen’s proposal was his attempt to slow the growth in bill introductions seen in recent years.
He said 1,400 bills were introduced over the past two sessions, the most since at least 2008.
A decade ago, that number was nearer to 1,100 bills. Hansen said senators should focus on “quality, not quantity.”
Less focus on hearings, more on debate
In an interview after the vote, Hansen said his main goal was to slow the increase in public hearings for bills. The Nebraska Legislature is unusual among state legislatures in that it holds a public hearing for every bill proposed.
Speaker John Arch has said he worries about the sustainability of that approach if bill numbers continue to rise.
State Sen. John Cavanuagh of Omaha opposed the change. He argued that senators might produce more proposals with the cap, not fewer.
Cavanaugh and others warned colleagues about the increased risk of rolling multiple senators’ proposals into unwieldy bills.
That would make it harder for the public and lawmakers to comb through what’s in a bill and the consequences of bill language.
“My concern is you’d put a bill out that has a lot of content in it, and some parts of the bill don’t get discussed or parsed,” he said.
Opponents of the rules change, including State Sen. Danielle Conrad of Lincoln, said elected leaders shouldn’t hamstring future elected leaders from proposing bills on behalf of their constituents.
Empowering the governor?
Some said the Legislature was limiting its constitutionally granted power to propose legislation but not the governor’s.
Hansen said 20 bills should be more than enough for a senator. His original proposal was for 14 bills, with incentives to propose fewer, but the bill was eventually amended to a cap of 20, with no incentives for those offering fewer bills.
“When you have too many bills, things get lost in translation,” Hansen said. “Yeah, we want to have hearings. We want to have testimony and hear from the people. Sometimes you get too much.”
Rules debate over
The Legislature ran out of time Friday to debate some more controversial rules changes proposed by State Sen. Steve Erdman of Bayard.
Among those were a proposal creating a sliding scale for floor votes. Erdman proposed lowering the number of votes needed to overcome a filibuster, based on how many senators were present and voting.
Erdman did get a floor vote Thursday on his proposal to end the Legislature’s tradition of electing its leaders by secret ballot. It fell short of the 30 votes needed.
Earlier in the week, senators adopted several procedural changes proposed by Arch that advanced out of committee with bipartisan support.