Legislative session day two: so many bills, so little time

Not all bills may be debated due to the limited time frame available during the session.

LINCOLN, Neb. (KLKN) – Despite a short time frame, Nebraska Senators need to get a lot of work done during the legislative session.

Speaker Mike Hilgers made an announcement on Thursday explaining the changes for this year’s legislative session regarding the time senators have to debate bills. Hilgers stressed the importance of everyone staying and schedule and planning on having long nights to get through as many bills as possible.

“Make sure we are strategically taking advantage of every single day that we have of floor debate here in the legislature. Otherwise, there is a high likelihood that we will not get through all of the priority bills this year. There simply is not enough time for us to do that unless we are all working together,” said Hilgers.

Much of the session will be focused on how senators will disperse around $1 billion in funds from the American Rescue Plan Act.

“it’s a short session, a 60-day session, but actually we will only have about half of the session to really to do bills other than bills that have to do with ARPA spending,” said Senator Dave Murman.

This year, senators will only have one hour to debate “A” bills. In previous years, senators had eight hours to debate “A” bills.

“‘A’ bills will just be one hour. With the exception, if it is a somewhat complicated ‘A’ bill we will do two hours. In my experience in the Legislature, there has not been an A bill that I can recall that on the substance ever required more than an hour to talk through,” said Hilgers.

With the short amount of time given, senators are expecting long hours to get all of the work done.

“We’re going to go late nights quite a bit it sounds like, and long days. So we will try to get all or as many as possible done, but physically in the amount of time we have we won’t get to everything,” said Senator Murman.

A controversial bill going through the legislature will be the Heartbeat Bill, which would make abortion illegal if a heartbeat can be detected from a fetus. Most senators feel strongly on both sides of the issue.

“That’s a very important bill. We will have time to do it. It’s controversial so we will take the time,” said Senator Murman.

The speaker explained the public comment session will mirror the changes from last year, as they were able to hear from around 1000 people. Senators will meet on Friday to learn how to best utilize the new system.