photo by: W.Va. Legislative Photography

West Virginia House of Delegates Speaker Roger Hanshaw, R-Clay, thanked House members Wednesday for their work over the last 43 days of the 60-day legislative session.

CHARLESTON — House Speaker Roger Hanshaw took to the floor of the West Virginia House of Delegates on Wednesday to thank his colleagues on their work this session one day after Gov. Patrick Morrisey accused the Legislature of inaction.

“To those who are hopefully listening outside our chamber today, I want you on behalf of this body to know that we are doing something,” said Hanshaw, R-Clay, during the final day for remarks from members in the House. “We’re doing much on as many problems as we’re able to solve.”

Hanshaw’s remarks come one day after Morrisey took to social media to criticize the Legislature after the failure of two of his public policy priorities: the defeat of his certificate of need repeal bill in the House Health and Human Resources Committee last month, and the defeat of his bill adding religious and philosophical exemptions to the state school-age mandatory immunization program.

“There’s no excuse for inaction,” Morrisey said. “There’s no excuse for failing to move the needle on issues that matter. There’s no excuse for just doing things the way they’ve always been done.”

“Not every problem can be solved by government. Not every problem can be solved by a law. Not every problem can be solved by a judge. Not every problem can be solved by the governor,” Hanshaw said. “I think all of us need to…continually reflect on the fact that the very best we can do is our best. The very best we as the government can do is try our best every single day to create a society that addresses real problems, that addresses the underlying cause, that addresses the root concern.”

The House of Delegates has passed 129 House bills to date, with Wednesday marking one week until Crossover Day when House bills must be passed and sent to the state Senate and vice versa. Of those 129 bills, five bills have completed the legislative process and three have been signed into law, including House Bill 2354, banning certain food dyes and food additives in the state.

The state Senate has passed 127 Senate bills over the same period of time, sending those bills to the House, with 16 Senate bills completing legislative action and nine of those bills having already been signed into law.

The House passed eight bills Wednesday, including House Bill 2027, changing the circumstances for when a child may be removed from a foster home; House Bill 2880, relating to parent resource navigators; House Bill 2987, relating to the state Consumer Data Protection Act; and House Bill 3289, and relating to expungement of certain criminal convictions.

Most of the eight bills passed with near-unanimous bipartisan support.

“We took up some serious things today,” Hanshaw said. “It may not have seemed that way to those outside the body, outside the building, but we took up questions today of how we address and how society addresses some of the most vulnerable people in our charge.

“We took up a discussion about foster care and young people who are our responsibility,” Hanshaw continued. “We talked about issues of criminal justice reform, how one gets a black mark expunged from one’s record to enter the workforce and rejoin society as a productive member. We talked about issues of criminal justice. This was a big day.”

The House changed its committee structure at the beginning of the year, creating six standing committees with multiple subcommittees along with a new two-day process for reviewing introduced bills. The new process involves agency reviews and comments on day one; with changes to the bill, discussion, and committee vote on day two.

“I’m proud of the way that all 100 members of this body have participated in the debate and the hearing stages that we’ve had on bills this session because in many instances it’s given us an opportunity to identify what the actual root cause of the problem is,” Hanshaw said. “In our attempt to be responsive to that call that somebody should do something, we often don’t know what we’re even trying to solve. And I appreciate how hard some of you here, most of you here, have worked in identifying what the root cause is on some of these problems.”

To date, only three of Morrisey’s bills have completed the legislative process, including Senate Bill 456, defining the terms “male” and “female” in State Code and protecting single-sex spaces. The 2025 regular session ends on Saturday, April 12, at midnight, though Morrisey threatened to call a special session this summer.

“The more work the Legislature gets done now, the less time it will spend in Charleston during the long, hot summer,” Morrisey said. “We are not going to accept West Virginia’s decline any longer.”

In closing Wednesday, Hanshaw called on the public for help in solving West Virginia’s systemic problems and to help lawmakers further identify where new laws might be effective.

“Our goal here is to create a society that lets society solve many of its own problems,” Hanshaw said. “Not every problem can be solved by the government, as much as I wish it could be, as much as many of you wish it could be. It simply doesn’t work that way.

“Our goal today for the next period of time we have together for this legislative session and always needs to be to contribute as well as we can contribute into society to allow men and women of West Virginia, families of West Virginia, citizens of West Virginia to solve our own problems and continue to create an environment in which that’s possible,” Hanshaw said.