HELENA — With just over a month before the start of the Montana Legislature’s 2025 session, lawmakers have taken the first steps toward setting the rules the session will operate under.
The House and Senate Rules Committees met Tuesday at the State Capitol – jointly in the morning to advance proposed rules for both chambers, then separately in the afternoon to discuss their own individual rules.
Some of the biggest changes the committees discussed came in response to what happened during the 2023 session. For example, the Republican majority on the Joint Rules Committee added an amendment saying that a governor’s veto is officially “received” by the Legislature when the clerk of the House or secretary of the Senate time stamps it. That change is intended to clarify questions that arose last year, when a lawsuit claimed the Legislature hadn’t received Gov. Greg Gianforte’s veto of Senate Bill 442 before the Senate adjourned on a surprise sine die motion.
A district court judge ordered a veto override poll on SB 442, saying lawmakers hadn’t had a legitimate opportunity to try overturning the veto. GOP leaders in the Legislature blasted that decision as an improper infringement on their authority over legislative procedures.
Democrats wanted to say that a veto wasn’t officially received until it was officially read across the rostrum in the House or Senate.
“If somebody wanted to, you know, play some games with the veto, they could sit on it and not forward it to the Senate so it would never actually be read over the rostrum,” said Senate Minority Leader Sen. Pat Flowers, D-Belgrade.
Republicans said that wasn’t necessary.
“We don't need to add a second step,” said Rep. Ed Buttrey, R-Great Falls. “As we know every step has a chance for gamesmanship and other things to happen.”
Sen. Steve Fitzpatrick, R-Great Falls, was Senate majority leader last session and will be House majority leader in 2025 after being elected to the chamber in November. He argued Flowers’ proposal would push more veto override attempts into being mail polls after the session – a negative, he said, because it’s harder to secure votes in a mail poll and because override polls are only conducted if a bill already got at least two-thirds support.
Fitzpatrick said there will also have to be a change in state law to implement the new definition of “received.”
The Senate Rules Committee also advanced an amendment that would change the rules for sine die motions, allowing for two supporters and opponents to speak before the vote is taken. Sine die motions have previously been non-debatable, and if they pass, they instantly end the Senate’s session. Supporters of changing that rule argued senators haven’t always known what was left to be resolved when they voted for sine die.
Republicans on the full joint committee also voted to add an amendment that would give the Legislature final say on whether a bill is essentially identical to one that has already failed. Legislative rules say a bill generally can’t be introduced if one “designed to accomplish the same purpose” was voted down earlier in the session.
This change came in response to a Montana Supreme Court decision from earlier this year that awarded legal fees to plaintiffs who had successfully challenged a state law restricting certain political activities on college campuses. In his opinion, Chief Justice Mike McGrath pointed to the rule on bills with the same purpose as evidence the Legislature had acted in “bad faith,” since lawmakers amended the law to include provisions from bills that had previously been defeated. Republican legislative leaders said the court had infringed on the separation of powers by interpreting the Legislature’s rules.
One proposed amendment that received a lot of debate but did not go forward would have changed policies for legislative restrooms, in response to transgender lawmakers. The proposal, from Rep. Jerry Schillinger, R-Circle, would have designated the restrooms, located between the House and Senate chambers, for lawmakers based on their biological sex at birth.
The amendment needed to receive a majority from House members and Senate members on the Joint Rules Committee to advance. It got enough votes to pass on the Senate side, but not on the House side.
Rep. Zooey Zephyr, D-Missoula, was Montana’s first openly transgender female lawmaker. Rep. SJ Howell, D-Missoula, was the first nonbinary lawmaker. Both were first elected in 2022 and reelected this year.
Rep. David Bedey, R-Hamilton, one of four Republicans to vote against the proposal, said this amendment would be a distraction from the Legislature’s work.
“This particular action will have the effect of making people famous in the national news, and will not contribute to the effective conduct of our business,” he said.
Bedey said leadership had worked out accommodations on this issue during the 2023 session, and that lawmakers he talked to told him they worked fine. Rep. Jedediah Hinkle, R-Belgrade, disagreed, saying other lawmakers told him they were uncomfortable with the arrangements.
“We need to set that precedent right now that women have their spaces, and they need to be comfortable in those spaces,” he said.
The Senate Rules Committee also voted down a proposal to make it harder to pass a “blast motion” – bringing a bill to the full Senate for debate after it has been rejected by a committee. Currently, it only takes a simple majority to successfully blast a bill in the Senate. Sen. Barry Usher, R-Yellowstone County, proposed raising that to 28 votes out of 50 – comparable to the House, where 55 votes out of 100 are required.
“The committees did a lot of work on a lot of bills,” Usher said. “I just think it’s insulting to the work that they did, and I think that we need to raise the bar a little bit.”
Sen. John Esp, R-Big Timber, said the simple majority to blast was one of the things he appreciated about the Senate.
“I think we relied and still rely on our power of persuasion, our logic, to convince 51% of us that it’s a good idea to bring it to the floor,” he said.
While the committees have advanced rules resolutions, that’s only a first step. The committees will have to meet again once the session starts in January, and the full House and Senate will have the final decision on whether to adopt rule changes.
