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The Blast - May 9, 2025 [1]

['The Texas Tribune']

Date: 2025-05 

KING’S BILLS FROZEN IN THE SENATE

As chair of the House State Affairs committee, Rep. Ken King sits at the nexus of a lot of issues in the Legislature. And so far, nearly all of his bills are gummed up in the Senate.

King, a Republican from Canadian, has authored 15 bills that the House has sent to the Senate, most of them in the month of April. All of them are frozen in time, as are 63 House bills sent to the Senate in the month of April.

Asked whether he was trying to send a message to King or the House regarding the number of House bills that have not been assigned a Senate committee, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick told The Blast that reporters ask the same questions every session.

“We pass our bills early in the Senate, and many of our bills, including priority bills, have been sitting in the House for months,” Patrick said in a statement, bringing up a point he’s made for weeks. “The House passes their bills later in session.”

“If we believe a House bill is good for Texas, has strong Republican support in the House, doesn’t have a surprise or big fiscal note, and doesn’t arrive in the Senate at the very last moment with hundreds of other House bills, it is likely to pass,” he continued. “It all works out in the end.”

But holding up one chamber’s bills to gain leverage over the other is a time-tested tool in the Texas Legislature. Given the Kumbaya nature of this session, good luck getting either chamber leader to confirm any tricky business, if it’s even happening.

It’s hardly just the Senate. Dozens of Senate bills sat unreferred to committees in the House for weeks.

Notably, King is captaining the THC effort in the House, which remains one of the major sticking points between the chambers. Patrick and the Senate want to ban consumable THC while King’s version of the bill would regulate it.

As an example of how King’s bills stand out, King authored nine of the 105 House bills from the first 150, which former House Speaker Dade Phelan set aside to represent the priorities that unite the majority of the House. The House sent 50 of those “priority” bills to the Senate in April. As of today, only six of those 50 bills have not still been referred to a Senate committee. All but one belong to King.

HB 27 would mandate financial literacy courses for high schoolers in public schools and HB 121 covers school safety. HB 106, HB 144 and HB 145 stem from the House Investigative Committee on the Panhandle Wildfires, which devastated King’s district and others last year. New House Speaker Dustin Burrows hails from nearby(-ish) Lubbock and served on the committee, while King served as chair.

Only two of King’s bills have been referred to a Senate committee. However, those were assigned homes in early April, only days before King’s State Affairs Committee considered his THC regulatory bill, House Bill 28. House Bill 13 sits untouched in the Senate Finance Committee and House Bill 143 was left pending in the Senate Natural Resources Committee on April 16.

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[1] Url: https://thetexastribune.beehiiv.com/p/the-blast-may-9-2025-6a7afc8644857ad2

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