To celebrate rolling out our newest feature, filtering by bill progress, we are taking a look at bill progress across the states. The following analysis is about bills introduced since the beginning of 2014 through now (May 2014). Note MT, ND, NV, and TX are out of session this year, and NC has not started it’s session yet. They are not included in this analysis. First, let’s take a look at the overall picture, across all states in session, the US Congress, and DC:
The categories are introduced but made it no further, assigned to committee in the originating chamber, crossed over to the other chamber (engrossed, read on the floor of the second chamber, assigned to a committee in the second chamber, etc), passed (enrolled, sent to governor, signed by governor or secretary of state, enacted all count as passed), or failed/dead/vetoed. You won’t be surprised to learn that most bills wind up in committee and never come out. But those that do rarely get stuck in the second house. But how does that story play out state by state? If you are a regular reader of this blog you probably already know the answer: it varies, by *a lot*.
Of course not all states are out of session yet (this is my favorite session map, from NCSL) so some bills will yet make it out of committee and get passed. Here’s a look at how that process generally plays out over time:
As you can see introductions peak in late January (with a secondary peak in February when several states start their sessions) and drops off sharply afterwards, crossing over peaks in mid March, and passing bills peaks in mid April, although there is still sustained activity for weeks afterwards
Given the time delay another interesting question is how does that look in each state? How long do bills stay in committee before moving on? Considering only bills that subsequently got out of committee:
This graphic shows the minimum and maximum days in committee, as well as the average days in committee, with plus and minus one standard deviation marked too. For most states 15-40 days seem normal, though some bills can hang out in committee a loooong time.
Finally I’d like to close with a simple heat map showing average days for a bill to pass in each state:
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