What happened week one of #KYGA25?
Well, friends, we are more than 13% of the way done with Kentucky’s 2025 legislative session and what a time we have already had.
Actually, honestly, this year’s session has been off to a slow and snowy start. It looks like the GOP-dominated legislature is keeping — at least, as of right now — some of their pre-session promises.
Here’s the recap of week one of #KYGA25. (That hashtag, btw, stands for Kentucky General Assembly 2025. Use it on your favorite social media platform to find folks posting about the session.)
Keeping promises?
So far, it looks like two of the things we told y’all to look out for are holding true.
First, a bill to reduce the income tax (House Bill 1) has been the only measure to move thus far. It passed out of the House on a 90-7 margin Thursday afternoon, and passed out of a Senate committee on Friday.
This means they’ll be able to pass it and send it to Gov. Andy Beshear, who seems poised to sign it into law, in early February.
Second, the legislature has definitely been keeping to their promises of short session energy. Read: Sessions in odd-numbered years in Kentucky are historically meant to focus on not a lot of bills, and mainly those with smaller or technical changes.
Of course, it snowed and everything, but week one definitely embodied short session energy. They only moved one bill and many of the bills filed were ones we’ve seen before in previous years that didn’t move at all.
Typically with short sessions, though, everything ramps up fast when lawmakers return to Frankfort for the rest of session Feb. 4. They have until the end of February to file new bills, and you often see some of the biggest, most controversial ones drop right before the deadline.
Key moments
We gotta start with the snow. The legislature is actually required by the Kentucky Constitution to start on a certain day, and that day was Tuesday, weather and snow-covered roads be damned.
It looks like basically every lawmaker made it there safely in time (several appeared to have gotten there over the weekend to avoid the storm).
And then, of course, we have to pomp and circumstance that is the first day of the session. About 86% of lawmakers were starting fresh terms, so almost everyone got to stand up and take the oath and publicly promise they’ve never fought a duel with deadly weapons.
Keeping with the formalities of the first day, both chambers passed their ground rules for the next few months. Both the House and Senate had some changes, and I fear I’m about to get a little wonky, so please hang with me.
The biggest change was one that essentially added a way to limit debate on a bill. Dems in both chambers criticized the move, but it still passed. It is hard to say exactly how much debate this could stifle, especially in high-profile debates over controversial bills (read: basically all anti-LGBTQ+ legislation), but I guess we’ll find out soon.
Another change of note: Whether or not all bills get assigned to a committee. The House and Senate have had different policies on this, and this year, they swapped policies.
I told you I was gonna get wonky, so, again please hear me out; I have a point, I promise. Once a bill gets filed, it goes to a place called the Committee on Committees. As you may have guessed, this is a committee dedicated to assigning bills to committees, where they get their first vote in the legislative process.
In the past, the House and Senate took different approaches on this. The House would let bills leadership didn’t love wither and die in the Committee on Committees; the Senate almost immediately assigned all bills to a committee and let them wither and die there instead.
This year, the policies flipped. The House will now have five legislative days from a bill’s filing to assign it to a committee. But the Senate will no longer assign everything to a committee, making it easier for bills to, again, wither and die.
Another start-of-session tradition: The Governor’s State of the Commonwealth Address. Gov. Andy Beshear delivered a roughly 45-minute-long speech covering all of his favorite topics. Not much new news, but you can watch the full thing on YouTube if you’d like. (He starts speaking around the 13-minute mark.)
What about the bills?
Lawmakers have filed more than 260 bills already, with more to come in February. Queer Kentucky is tracking all of the bills you need to know about with our #KYGA25 bill tracker.
So far, a few trends jump out at me. As per usual with the start of a session, we have a lot of perennial bills — those things that get filed year after year, and are almost immediately DOA.
But we have the promised income tax reduction bill, House Bill 1, which has already cleared the House and should head to the governor’s desk in early February.
We already have a few bills aimed at the LGBTQ+ community:
- House Bill 64: Undoes Gov. Andy Beshear’s Executive Order banning conversion therapy for minors.
- House Bill 154: Blocks public health insurance plans from covering gender-affirming care.
- House Bill 163: Would require 95% of a school’s bathrooms to be designated for a specific biological sex.
It’s unclear if these bills will go anywhere, and if they do, how much support they would have.
You can take a look at all of the bills filed on the LRC website.
What’s next
Lawmakers are on a break until Feb. 4. From there, they’ll meet throughout much of February and March before closing out the session March 28.
The break doesn’t mean politics will completely grind to halt. There are sure to be plenty of pressers and organizing calls for advocates and folks wanting to get involved with advocacy. But lawmakers won’t be meeting and can’t file any new bills.