We are more than two-thirds of the way through the West Virginia Legislature’s 60-day session, racing toward midnight on Saturday, March 11.

We’re up to 2,225 bills that have been introduced, with 138 bills that have passed the Senate, 103 bills that have passed the House of Delegates, 25 bills that have completed legislative action and 15 bills have been signed by Gov. Jim Justice.

As I pointed out last week, I think that is pretty slow, especially with less than three weeks left of the 2023 legislative session. Today is the last day for bills to be introduced in the Senate; the House hit that deadline on Valentines Day.

This coming Sunday is the final day for bills to be out of committees in order to have three full days of reading before Wednesday, March 1, also known as Crossover Day. It’s the day a House or Senate bill must be passed and sent across the hall to the other body.

One thing I left out of my column last week is the Republican majorities in both chambers have a trick to speed up things in case of a log jam: suspending constitutional rules requiring bills be read on three separate days.

This has become a controversial practice to some, usually people new to monitoring the legislative process who think this is some sneaky tactic. The West Virginia Constitution requires bills to be read on three separate days before final passage. But the constitutional rule does have an exception: a vote of four-fifths of members in each chamber can override this rule. This process is only used for some bills and both parties have used this procedure.

True, the Senate overrode the rule for a couple of years at the beginning of the session to quickly pass bills on the first day of session that easily passed the Senate the previous year. And this year they even moved some new bills. But usually you see this rule overridden either during special sessions in order to quickly wrap up the session before costing taxpayers additional money, or toward the end of the regular session to get bills out the door and move on to the next bill.

Up until last year, the Republican majorities in the House and Senate have needed some Democratic members to get to the four-fifths needed to override the rule. But after the November election last year, Republicans have more than enough members to suspend the rules and not need a vote from the minority party to do so.

That creates some problems for Democratic lawmakers as the session comes to a close. The vote to override the constitutional rule was a valuable tool to use, either to slow down bad bills they didn’t like or to barter to allow good bills through in order to kill bad bills later. But now that the Republican majorities no longer need them to suspend rules, it limits the parliamentary tricks Democrats can use to stop bills they don’t like.

I’m no parliamentary expert, but I think the only trick remaining up the sleeves of Democratic lawmakers would be moving to have bills be read in full. It’s a non-debatable motion and if the bill is long and can definitely be a good delaying tactic that can put good bills at risk of being lost due to the time lost in reading aloud a very long and technical bill.

But this motion isn’t made often, as it requires the lawmaker who made the motion to stay in their chair the entire time bills are being read. It also is more of a punishment for the staff of the House and Senate clerks who have to do all the reading.

I know this is all probably too much inside baseball, but these are the things this ink-stained statehouse wretch thinks about.

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The House is the only body in the chamber that allows for public hearings on bills. Any delegate can request a public hearing on a bill at the request of a constituent. Public hearings usually last an hour and people can either sign up to speak for or against the bill.

How long a member of the public gets to speak largely depends on how long the public hearing is and how many sign up to speak. During the special session on the abortion ban bill over the summer, speakers only had 45 seconds to speak. Usually, speakers get about one minute or more to speak on the bill.

Public hearings can be useful sometimes for grabbing comments for stories from real people. But the problem with public hearings is how they are weighted. It’s rarely someone requesting a public hearing because they are for a bill; it’s people requesting a public hearing because they are against a bill.

As a result, you hear more from those against the bill. It gives the perception that most are against the bill, when that may not be the case. Public hearings tend to attract activist groups, advocacy groups, and lobbyists, but not as many real people affected by the bill. At the same time, very few people for the bill sign up, giving the opposite perception that not many are for the bill when that also might not be the case.

Point being, while public hearings sound nice in theory, I just don’t believe they give lawmakers, the press, or even the public an accurate perception about a bill one way or another. There has to be a better way for the public to weigh in on legislation that truly gauges where the public is on an issue.