Proposed Kentucky amendment would allow GOP-led legislature to call special sessions

House Speaker David Osborne, R-Prospect, wants to change how Kentucky’s annual legislative sessions work.

House Bill 4, filed by Osborne Tuesday, would do away with the constitutionally-set session end date (known as “Sine Die”) and allow the General Assembly to set its own schedule for 60-day long sessions during even-numbered years and 30-day sessions in off years. It would also allow the Senate president and speaker of the House to call special sessions no more than twice a year and for no more than 12 legislative days.

Currently, only the governor has the constitutional power to call a special legislative session. In 2022, Kentucky was one of just 14 states where this was the case. Kentucky’s legislature has been led by Republicans in both chambers since the November 2016 election, but has had a Democratic governor in Andy Beshear since late 2019.

Under the regular session schedule change, short and long sessions would have the same amount of work days but could extend longer into the year than the currently set end dates of March 30 and April 15. The legislature would have to establish a calendar for session by law, Osborne said. Changes to the newly-set end date would have to be agreed upon by three-fifths of the House and Senate.

If that sounds somewhat familiar, that’s because the basic ideas have already been tested on the ballot. On the 2022 ballot was Amendment 1, a much longer proposal that failed by 7 percentage points at the ballot box. It gained easy passage in the legislature, with nearly all Republicans supporting it alongside a minority of Democrats. The problem on the ballot was messaging.

Beshear derided the similar constitutional amendment as a “power grab,” especially given that it was passed amid Republican frustration over Beshear’s executive actions on COVID-19 mitigation at the height of the pandemic.

Osborne said the simpler messaging proposed in this year’s House Bill 4 could prove more successful in a future election. The length of Constitutional Amendment 1 caused issues last time, he said.

“I think the main thing is to keep it simple and keep it in terms that can very easily be understood. If you’ll recall, when it showed up on the ballot it was an epistle that was next to impossible to understand,” Osborne said.

“We even had some members that read it until we figured out exactly what it said.”

More than 53% of Kentucky voters rejected the amendment the last time it was on the ballot.

The amendment performed the worst in Franklin County, where the seat of state government is located. About 72% of voters there voted “no.” It generally performed better in Republican-leaning areas than Democratic strongholds like Lexington and Louisville.

Why is this needed? Osborne said the constitutionally-set end dates can sometimes cause the legislature to rush and pass less-than-ideal versions of important legislation like the state’s budget.

“There are so many times when we’re forced to do things that we may not be ready for,” Osborne said.

He used the 2020 session — where the legislature was forced to pass a two-year budget by April 15, when uncertainty abounded about the nature and length of the COVID-19 pandemic — as an example.

“We didn’t know what it was gonna do to anybody — to law enforcement officials, to businesses. We didn’t know anything, and yet we were required to finish up by April 15, to wrap everything up in some kind of way. I just think that we would be so much more responsive if we were able to temporarily hit the pause button, knowing that we’re coming back, especially on big issues like the budget,” Osborne said.

Only four constitutional amendments can make the ballot during an even-numbered year, and several different ideas are percolating through the legislature. So far, the most unanimous Republican support has been shown to the idea of a “school choice” amendment that would allow the legislature to help fund non-public forms of K-12 education.