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The Blast - May 23, 2025 [1]

['The Texas Tribune']

Date: 2025-05 

Today is the House’s local bill deadline 4 days until the House’s Senate bill deadline 5 days until the Senate bill deadline 10 days until sine die

THE DEARTH OF HOUSE BILLS

The 2025 Texas House bill deadline may have been last week, but today marks the final day that the House can pass its last subset of House bills.

With the House adjourned, we can confidently say: Despite members filing a record number of bills this session, the 2025 Texas House passed the smallest share of its bills in recent memory. By a long shot.

Since the 1990s, the number of bills filed has been trending upward while the number of bills passed has remained relatively steady, although the recent trend had been elevated.

State representatives filed 5,644 bills this session, up from the previous record 5,413 bills last session. At the same time, the number of House bills passed by the House fell from another record 1,566 last session to 1,158 this session. It represented the sharpest drop-off in bill passing efficiency that the House has seen since at least the 72nd legislative session in 1991.

You can also view this as a graph here.

Obviously, something is different this session than in past sessions. Speaker Dustin Burrows got a late start on making committee assignments, but the first House floor calendar occurred on the 78th day of session, the same as in 2023.

Perhaps there are more members in the doghouse this session than last session. That sounds plausible, given the high number of freshmen who oppose House leadership.

However, take a look at what’s going on with the local and consent calendar.

The House placed 737 House bills on local and consent calendars in 2023. This session, the House only attempted to place 141 House bills on the local and consent calendar.

Further evidence that the local and contested calendar was the choke point is the daily House calendar. That’s the list of bills that go through the usual process of questions, debate and amendments on the floor.

The main chunk of the daily calendar is the “general state calendar,” and the House passed 845 bills off that calendar in 2023. This session, the House passed 1,046 bills that way, the long and hard way.

The local and consent calendar is an important mechanism for the House to pass bills during their crammed schedule. They can pass pages and pages of bills in one fell swoop. The trick is that the bills have to be mostly uncontested.

Last session, only five members opposed leadership at every turn. That dropped to four after the House expelled Rep. Bryan Slaton, R-Royse City, in early May. This session, the number of consistent anti-leadership members is somewhere in the high teens.

All it takes is five members to strip a bill from the local and consent calendar, or one member to filibuster it long enough. That means that this session, the House disruptors have plenty who are willing to do that.

Of course, this is only for one chamber. The Senate still has to pass the House’s bills for them to become law.

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[1] Url: https://thetexastribune.beehiiv.com/p/the-blast-may-23-2025-99d2bc84b42a2c77

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