Dead & Alive: Which bills survived Crossover Day?

By Stephen Baldwin, RealWV

Crossover Day is the final deadline for bills to leave their chamber of origin. That means, for example, if a bill is proposed in the House this February, it must be passed by the House and head to the Senate by Crossover Day in order to remain alive. Bills which do not make it out of their house of origin are considered “dead.” (There are ways to resurrect bills, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.)

Wednesday was Crossover Day. So, here’s a quick rundown of some well-known bills, showing which are alive and which are dead (at least for now). This is not an exhaustive list; it includes bills I’ve been watching.

These bills remain officially ALIVE:

• Conceal carry for 18-20 year olds, SB30
• Tax cut for metallurgical coal, HB5687
• Income tax cut for residents, SB392
• Scrapping the high school transfer rule, HB4425
• Removing personal information from political donor requirements, SB640
• Restoring gun access for those who are subjects of domestic violence protective orders, SB963
• Modifying school state aid formula, HB5453
• TEAM-WV Economic Development restructure, HB4001
• Loosening regulation of above-ground storage tanks, SB641
• Prohibition of “adult cabaret performances”, SB590
• Privatizing Child Protective Services in a pilot program, SB937
• Funding maintenance at the Cultural Center, HB5685
• Judicial pay increases, SB29
• Abortion pill reversal, SB805

These bills are officially DEAD:

• Raylee’s Law, HB5669
• Clean Water Fund for southern WV, HB5525
• Increasing public school support staff, SB801 (& others)
• Death Penalty, SB1037

For the remainder of the legislative session, the House can only consider Senate bills and vice versa. If both chambers agree on a bill and pass it, it goes to the governor for a signature (or veto, or he can choose not to sign it and allow it to become law). If, for example, the Senate likes the House bill on economic development but wants to make changes, then the House would have to agree to those changes before it can become law.

Which leads us to how bills can be resurrected. None of the “dead” bills listed above are actually dead. They are dead as separate pieces of legislation that exist on their own. But they could be resurrected by combining their contents into a similar bill that affects the same area of state code. For example, the Senate could resurrect a school calendar bill as part of the high school transfer bill.

The final two weeks of session is dominated by horse-trading among legislators, which leads to all sorts of strange bedfellows and new incarnations of old bills.

Stay tuned for continued coverage as the session winds up near its end.