This weekend puts the West Virginia Legislature nearly three weeks into its 2026 session. Both the House of Delegates and Senate have brought several bills to the floor of their respective chambers.

The House has already passed multiple bills in the “Jobs First — Opportunity Everywhere” platform it touted before the session even began. One updated the state’s financial support for industrial access roads, doubling it from $3 million to $6 million. Another increased the caps on microgrants for the West Virginia Business Ready Sites program. Were those earth-shaking advances? Probably not, but they help bolster the House’s mission of improving the economic outlook of the Mountain State.

Over in the Senate? They spent two days debating over how many versions of the Bible would be available to public school social studies students in the fourth, eighth and 10th grades. They ultimately decided to furnish those classes just with the Aitken Bible through private donations. There was an amendment to include the Catholic Bible in those classrooms as well, but that amendment ultimately failed.

Again, this wasn’t a debate about whether Bibles would be made available in public school classrooms, but a debate about which versions would be available. And that debate lasted two days.

The contrast in legislative bodies is disappointing, but not all that surprising.

How could it be? Before the session began, House Speaker Roger Hanshaw, R-Clay, stood with the House’s Republican supermajority in early December to discuss the group’s platform and offer a roadmap to what it wanted to accomplish in 2026.

On the flipside, we had the Senate – with its own Republican supermajority – remaining mum about its agenda. Senate President Randy Smith did not attend the West Virginia Press Association’s Legislative Lookahead, where he could have laid out some of those plans. But Sen. Eric Tarr, R-Putnam, did — and told everyone in attendance that the Senate Republican majority “has no consensus on an agenda at all.” Keep in mind this was five days before the Legislature gaveled in.

Days later at the annual “Issues and Eggs” event in Charleston, Smith told the audience that he was leaving it up to his committee chairs to drive the session’s agenda.

“I’ve got a job to do and all I can tell you is I’m going to do my job. We do have a plan,” Smith claimed. “I’ve got committee chairs sitting in there that’s been working on things, their agenda … To say that we don’t have a plan is kind of unfair because we do have a plan.”

Did that plan include two days of debate on the Bible?

These two scenarios show the strength in leadership of the West Virginia House — and the lack of leadership in the West Virginia Senate. The House unveiled a plan complete with involved descriptions of its main pillars. The Senate leader simply claimed they had a plan.

The Legislature has a finite amount of time to pass bills to make West Virginians’ lives better. Entering the session with a concrete game plan is essential. One side did that. The other apparently did not.

We have said for years that for West Virginia to truly move forward, legislators must put social issue bills on the back-burner and focus more on economic development, be that through job creation, educational improvements or fixing regulations to make it easier for businesses to do business.

If one chamber chooses to bog itself down with social issues, it gums up the entire process, and important bills are forced to wait in queue for debate while Republicans simply argue with each other.

Elected officials keep talking about not wanting the state to be last or close to last in every major category. The path upward is easy. Skip the culture war stuff and pass bills that make the state better.

That’s good advice for everyone at the Capitol.