The 108th Nebraska Legislature convened its second session on January 3rd. The session will last sixty legislative days. During the first ten days of the session Senators can introduce new bills and resolutions. Bills and resolutions that were introduced last session (2023) but did not make it through to passage are considered “carryover” bills and can be taken up in this session. There are over 500 carryover bills, but most will not get consideration this session.
In this short session, bills that are designated as “priority” for a Senator, a committee, or the Speaker have the best opportunity to be debated on the floor of the Legislature. Each Senator gets one priority bill, Committees get two, and the Speaker gets twenty-five. Bills that are not prioritized, not able to be placed on consent calendar, or not able to be attached to another moving bill will have little chance for passage.
In the first several days of the session, Senators will be debating over twenty changes to the permanent rules of the Legislature. As Speaker Arch indicated with his 28 proposed changes, the goal is to “have majority rule with minority voice”. The last session held in 2023 was mired in filibusters and resulted in large numbers of bills being packaged together to get them passed. Speaker Arch has indicated that he intends to return to the traditional single bill consideration rather than packaging multiple bills into one.
The issues that will take up most of the floor time this session will be taxes, including property and sales taxes, economic development, and workforce housing.
