Thousands of House Bills Officially Died Today. Here’s Why.

Thousands of bills introduced in the Texas House officially died today, marking the beginning of the end of the session.

Why? It’s because of the rules that the House adopted at the beginning of session, which set hard deadlines for House committees to make recommendations on bills and for the House to place those bills on its floor calendar.

Every bill in Texas must be heard and considered by both chambers of the Legislature before it can be sent to the governor to become law, and those deadlines give the Senate time to consider the bill, refer it to a committee and vote on it twice. (Senate committees don’t have corresponding deadlines for passing Senate bills out.) 

This session, Monday marked the last day for House committees to report their recommendations on bills and joint resolutions to the full body. When the clock rolled over to Tuesday overnight, the train left the station for any House bill that hadn’t yet been reported out of committee.

Legislators have filed 5,702 proper bills in the Texas House this session as of Tuesday and considered more than 1,000 resolutions, joint resolutions and concurrent resolutions.

Thousands of those bills were introduced on the House floor throughout the session and referred to committees, where they were never heard due to lack of support or because they duplicated a policy or bill in the Senate.

Though in theory those referred bills could have been pulled out of limbo by a committee chair for a proper hearing and then been recommended to the House floor, in practice they are effectively dead on arrival if they are not placed on the committee schedule within a few weeks. Many have languished in referral for months, with little hope for passage.

But as of Tuesday there were exactly 500 proper bills that were still pending in House committees or subcommittees — either because legislators were working behind the scenes to whip up support before a formal vote, or because the committee didn’t intend to pass them out.

Both of those categories of bills officially died when Monday turned to Tuesday, running out the clock on the limit for passing House bills out of committee.

One of the pending measures that died on Tuesday was a controversial bill with Gov. Greg Abbott’s backing targeting “non-human behaviors” in schools, based on debunked claims about public school accommodations for furries. That proposal, House Bill 54, boasted the sponsorship of 56 of the House’s 88 Republicans. 

The House has deadlines coming up every day this week beyond Monday’s committee cutoff.

By the end of today, the House will have to distribute its last daily floor calendar that has House bills on it. After that, the next floor calendars will consist only of Senate bills that the upper chamber already has approved.

Tomorrow is the deadline for the House to distribute its final local and consent calendar with consent House bills, which are measures that are considered routine or uncontroversial.

Thursday will mark the last day for the House to consider House bills and House joint resolutions in second reading on its daily or supplemental calendar. Each bill must be read three times to pass out of the chamber.

And Friday will mark the last day for the House to consider routine House bills on its local and consent calendar, and the last day for it to consider any House bills and House joint resolutions in third reading from the supplemental calendar.