Halftime at the Montana Legislature, Here’s Where It’s At

It's almost halftime at the 90-day session of the Montana Legislature, and they only meet once every other year. Needless to say, that is a lot of work that needs to be done, and not a lot of time to do it. So where do things stand?

Jeff Laszloffy shared a great update on Thursday morning. He is the President of the Montana Family Foundation. He said the Montana State Senate could wrap up for their weeklong "transmittal break" Thursday night, while the Montana House could wrap up Friday morning.

The transmittal deadline not only marks the halfway point, it is also an important deadline for certain bills.

Jeff Laszloffy: The deadline kills not just the bills that were introduced, but failed to clear one house or the other, but in a very real sense it kills the prospect of legislators being able to introduce any new bills. Of the 4,621 bill titles that were reserved, only 1,400 of them were drafted into actual bills. That's not to say that there won't be more.

Laszloffy told listeners that there is still time to introduce bills that deal with revenue or spending.

 Jeff Laszloffy:...but the window is closing on those bills as well. In the 2021 session, 3,336 bill titles were reserved, and of those 1,300 were actually introduced. So we're slightly ahead of last session.

Click here for the latest legislative updates from the Montana Family Foundation.

We also got a halftime update from Montana's Speaker of the House.  Here's the full audio of our conversation with Speaker of the House Matt Regier (R-Kalispell) from Thursday morning as well: