We’re 28 days into the 2024 legislative session and though we’re 319 miles away from lawmakers in Olympia, we can still have an impact on what gets decided this year — whether it’s banning lead fuel at airports or implementing rent increase caps.
We talked to Senate Majority Leader Andy Billig of Spokane, and Alex Bond, a communications specialist for the Senate Democratic Caucus in Olympia, and we’re going to tell you everything you need to know to get your thoughts to the people making the decisions and how to be as informed as possible when you do.
We spoke to Democrats because they control the process at all levels of state government in Washington, and because, unlike primaries or caucuses, these aren’t partisan processes. The way we yell at our legislators during session is the same whether you’re Republican, Democrat, a member of the John Birch Society or you drive one of those vanloads of Antifa we haven’t heard much about lately.
Politics is an access game, but in Washington state, you don’t have to be Gary to get in an official’s ear.
In order to harangue most effectively, it’s important to understand how the whole process works. There’s an extremely helpful process glossary on the legislature’s overview page and a citizen’s guide to legislative participation, but stay here and we’ll make it fun. So strap in, put on your learning hat and get ready for a RANGE state civics explainer.
How legislative sessions work
At the start of each year, state lawmakers — senators like Billig and representatives like Timm Ormsby and Marcus Riccelli — descend on Olympia for the legislative session to introduce, debate and occasionally take votes on bills. Our legislature is a part-time assembly — very part time — and that means most legislation doesn’t get very far. Washington operates on a two-year cycle: odd-year sessions are the big ones, lasting 105 days and include negotiating the state budget for the following two years. Even-year sessions last a tight, sometimes frantic, 60 days.
In this narrow window, bills and their lawmakers navigate a maze from introduction and first reading to the governor’s desk.
“There’s, like, 39 places where a bill can die, but no place where it can take an express route to become law,” Billig said.
“The bill can die because it didn’t get scheduled for a hearing,” he added. “It can die because it didn’t get scheduled for a vote. It can die because it got scheduled for a vote, but didn’t have the vote. It can then die in the next committee for the same reasons. It can go to the Rules Committee and never get out of the Rules Committee. It can go to the floor calendar and never be scheduled by the floor leader for a vote. It can come up for a vote and fail and then repeat in the other chamber and then it can go to the governor and he can veto it.”
Which is by design. Billig said potential laws should be scrutinized because it’s better to kill a bill than pass a law that isn’t right or could cause more harm than good.
Just because the process is arduous for the bills themselves doesn’t mean it needs to be hard for citizens to get involved in shaping them.
We’ll go through the whole process here and note the places where you — yes, you — can effectively participate. The process goes in this order:
- Introduction/First Reading: The bill is introduced on the floor, read for the first time and shuffled to the proper committee.
- Committee Action: Committees hold public hearings to hear from you and decide if a bill will move on.
- Rules Committee: Determines which bills move to the floor to be debated and voted on.
- Second Reading: The bill is read to the entire chamber and amendments are made on the floor.
- Third Reading/Final Vote: More discussion and debate before a final vote to move it out of the chamber.
- Rinse and Repeat in the next chamber: A bill needs to pass in both chambers. The second chamber can make amendments and if they do, the first needs to agree to them or come to a compromise.
- Governor’s Desk: The governor can sign or veto a bill.
Because of the intense time pressure of even the longer legislative sessions, each step of the process is governed by a rigid timeline. If a bill is still hung up in committee when the clock runs out on that phase, it’s effectively dead. (On odd-numbered years, bills that stall can be carried over to the following year, but anything that stalls this year is dead, dead.)
That’s why it’s important to engage at the right times to give the things you care about a puncher’s chance of running the gauntlet.
From introduction to testifying in committee
When a lawmaker wants to introduce a new bill that they sponsor, they file it and it is introduced on the floor of the chamber to which they belong (so Billig’s bills would be introduced on the Senate floor and Ormsby’s bills would be introduced on the House floor). “Introduction” is also called “First Read.” Because even the long sessions are relatively short, there’s also a one-month period before the start of the session evocatively named “Prefiling,” when lawmakers can file legislation they want to push before the session starts. Prefiled bills are automatically introduced in their respective chambers on the first day of a new session.
Find out which bills will be introduced on the next legislative day here by clicking either “House” or “Senate” next to “Bill Introductions.”
Once a bill is introduced, leadership in the respective chamber will refer bills to different committees based on the subject — this is where bills get reviewed, get public hearings and get amendments added to them.
Information on all bills can be found here, where you can access tons of information including bill status reports, committee reports, bills by topic and even create a personal bill tracking list.
If you’re curious about how much a proposed bill would cost, you can check a bill’s Fiscal Note to see how much, why and where lawmakers expect that money would come from. Those are linked on the bill page, but will take you to the state Office of Financial Management’s website.
Committees are where most of the action happens. Where you come in is the public hearing session, which bills need to have before going to a vote on the floor. Because legislators have such a small period of time to get these bills through the process (especially in even-numbered years), Billig said committee chairs generally prioritize what bills get a public hearing and a vote based on theirs and the state’s priorities and if the bill has sufficient momentum and backing.
Building that momentum and backing is where lobbying — including by you — comes in.
“The [places] where you can be the most effective on that, I think, are the ones where if you know that the bill is in this particular committee, and you know that your legislator sits on that committee,” said Bond, the staffer for the state Democratic Caucus. “Those are the ones where you can have the most impact, sort of saying, like, ‘Hey, this bill that I’m passionate about is before your committee right now. I would really love to see it pass, here’s why,’ and laying that out.”
You don’t need to have any special training to testify in committee, you only need to register to testify. You can also testify in-person or remote, provide written testimony or “sign-in” for or against a bill. The state has detailed instructions on how to do each of these here.
Billig said that testimony in committee is listened to by the committee members and can be incredibly powerful, but noted that even just emailing your legislators can have great influence.
At the beginning of each legislative session, each bill is given a “cut off” date by which it needs to be out of committee. Bond stressed the importance of keeping an eye on the session cut-off calendar to make sure that you’re getting in testimony and public comment to the right committees on time.
The committee chair will decide if a bill gets moved to executive session, where it gets voted on by the committee members. They can pass it, pass it with amendments or pass a substitute. If the bill doesn’t make it to the executive session, it dies. If it doesn’t get enough votes in executive session, it dies.
It doesn’t necessarily mean the eternal death of a bill, though. Legislators will often introduce a bill in one session knowing that it won’t pass yet just to get the idea out there and then bring it back in the next session. This happened last year with Senate Bill 5435, which would tie rent increases to the rate of inflation, capping the amount landlords can increase rent each year. It didn’t pass in the 2023 session, and now lawmakers are bringing it back this year as a “carryover” bill. It’s currently in the Senate Housing Committee.
“Sometimes bills just aren’t ready,” Billig said. A lawmaker needs the support of the chair of the committee and the chair is the one who schedules a bill for a vote. Billig said that, generally, the chair won’t schedule a bill for a vote unless they know it has the votes. He also noted that it’s very unusual for a chair to go against a popular bill.
(Rules) Committee Rules Everything Around Me
This is the big boi. It’s not the final boss, but it’s like the midway boss that’s really hard to get through and takes all your extra lives. There’s not much regular people can do here other than contacting your representatives, especially if one of them sits on the rules committee in either the house or senate.
Members of the Rules Committee decide what bills get to move onto the floor of the House so they can be debated, amended and voted on by the entire chamber. For both chambers, this committee moves bills through a three-step filtering process: Rules Review (House) or White Sheet (Senate), Rules Consideration (House) or Green Sheet (Senate) and then, for bills that successfully make it out of committee, to the Floor Calendar.
Bills referred to one of the rules committees start on the Review/White Sheet and get “pulled” onto the Consideration/Green Sheet, where they are then debated and voted on.
Each committee member gets a certain number of bills they are allowed to pull, a number the majority leader sets at the beginning of each meeting, usually based on how many bills they have on their plate at that time.
Once a bill is pulled, it moves to the Consideration/Green Sheet, where a member can propose to move the bill to the calendar with a voice vote. If that vote fails, it has to move back to the Review/White Sheet — it’s a little like landing on a slide space in Chutes and Ladders.
In short: all bills that make it to the rules committees are reviewed. Some, but often far from all, are pulled to consideration. Even fewer go to the floor. During this entire time, the public is mostly just along for the ride.
More readings and votes
For the few, the happy few, the batch of bills that make it out of the Rules Committees, it will go to the chamber floor or a Second Reading. Here, the bill is read to the entire body of the Senate or House, where lawmakers discuss and propose amendments. You can track what amendments lawmakers are trying to make to a bill and who votes for and against them by following the house and senate floor calendars.
If a bill passes the second reading, the rules technically say there needs to be at least a day before the Third Reading, but often, the legislature “suspends” the rules and goes straight to it.
In the Third Reading, legislators have more discussion and debates on the bill before they vote a final time on if they want to pass it out of their chamber and over to the other. If the “Chamber of Origin” is the Senate, it goes to the House for consideration, and vice versa. A bill needs to pass in both chambers in order to become a law.
The second chamber can pass the bill as is or amend it. If the bill is amended and passed in the second chamber, the first body either votes to accept the new amendment or the chamber of origin calls for a conference committee where members of the house and senate hash it out and look for a compromise. If they can’t, the bill dies.
Just because one chamber of the legislature passes a bill doesn’t mean the other side has to vote on it. The other way a bill can — well not die, but sort of just languish — is if the second chamber does not take any action before the legislative cutoff, which for that particular phase, is March 1 this year.
After a bill passes, it then goes to the governor’s desk, where they can sign or veto a bill. The veto is the most important thing here. The signature is a stamp of approval, but if the governor takes no action within the allotted amount of time, the bill automatically becomes law anyway.
So there you have it, folks: the whole process and where you can get in on it. This is the part where the screen cuts to a pixelated celebration montage. But there’s always more bills, like how the princess is always in another castle.
Read about how to harangue your representatives next!
