A Time for Miracles (Unless You're a Bill)

Where resurrection is reserved for the faithful—and occasionally, for legislation with good lobbyists.

It’s the season of resurrection. Easter is this weekend, Passover is underway, and in Salem, the Capitol is full of rituals, last-minute deliverance, and the occasional policy miracle.

But not everything gets a second chance. April 9 marked the First Chamber Deadline, and for hundreds of bills, that was the end of the line. No parting of the sea. No rolling away of the stone. Just a quiet burial in the committee graveyard and a faint hope of legislative reincarnation next session.

If you’re a bill that didn’t get a hearing, you’re not rising again—at least not this year.

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Judgment Day

April 9 is the legislative Hunger Games. If your bill hasn’t made it out of its first committee by then, it’s done. Doesn’t matter how many op-eds were written in support or how many lobbyists bought you coffee—if the chair doesn’t schedule it, the thing is compost.

Some see this as tyranny of the gatekeepers. Others see it as the only thing keeping legislative life from collapsing into chaos. The truth is, it’s both. It keeps the process somewhat manageable, but it also means some solid ideas get buried next to the weird ones.

The real power lives with the Speaker of the House, the Senate President, and the committee chairs. They decide what moves and what sits. You can have the best idea since pre-sliced bread, but if the chair isn’t feeling it—or just has 43 other things they care about more—it’s toast.

So legislators scramble. They beg, barter, and cajole. They meet in overstuffed offices with the sounds of building construction just outside the windows, try to charm their way into a hearing, and walk the tightrope between advocating and annoying. Meanwhile, the building fills with earnest constituents giving tearful testimony, paid lobbyists waving one-pagers, and public servants trying to make sense of it all.

And that’s before the real action starts.

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False Prophets, Real Lobbyists

Every session brings an avalanche of “ideas” dressed up as legislation. Some are serious. Some are stunts. Some are the policy equivalent of writing a strongly worded letter to your HOA (actually, we had at least one bill involving HOAs).

They come from everywhere: the governor, agencies, nonprofits, lobbyists, activist groups, and yes, that one guy in every town convinced that LED streetlights are a UN conspiracy. These bills are handed to committees, where their fate rests in the hands of a few people and the whims of the legislative calendar.

Sometimes, even getting a hearing is a win. It means your idea wasn’t laughed out of the room. If the committee likes what they hear—and, let’s be honest, if the politics line up—they might start amending it, negotiating, refining. It’s not pretty. It’s definitely not fast. But this is the part of lawmaking where something resembling substance is supposed to happen.

That said, tracking a bill's progress is like following a skittish cat through a hedge maze. One day there’s nothing, the next there’s a hearing, then nothing again. For most people, this process is invisible. For the people inside the building, it’s the whole ballgame.

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The Great Panic Before the Plague Passes

The week before the deadline is its own form of chaos. Picture a Costco parking lot on Christmas Eve—only with more spreadsheets and slightly fewer fender benders.

Lawmakers rush to get their bills on the schedule. Lobbyists scurry between offices with the frantic energy of people who’ve already had too much caffeine. Staffers juggle three conversations and five versions of the same bill. Committee chairs weigh which proposals are worth the time and which ones are a waste of oxygen.

Sometimes, there’s drama. A legislator might publicly accuse a chair of playing politics. The chair shrugs. “Didn’t have time,” they say. And maybe that’s true. But maybe it’s not. Power in the legislature is never evenly distributed, and sometimes it’s the quiet “no” that shapes the whole session.

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Ashes to Amendments

Once the deadline hits, the Capitol gets a little quieter. The pressure cooker lets out a little steam. Some staffers look visibly relieved. Others are already strategizing how to bring back their favorite idea next session with new packaging and a better title.

The bills that did pass committee head to the chambers’ floors. There, every member of the House or Senate gets to weigh in—either with thoughtful remarks or long-winded speeches clearly meant for YouTube. If it passes, it crosses over to the other chamber and the process starts all over again.

And if it fails? Well, there’s always next year. Or the year after that. Or maybe a clever amendment that slips it into a related bill when no one’s looking. Zombie bills, I call them. Dead in one form, reborn in another.

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Still Among the Living

A surprising number of heavy-hitters made it through. Gun regulation bills like HB 3075 and 3076 survived their first trial by fire, sparking plenty of heated hallway conversations, and melting down the email inboxes of every legislator. Housing measures are still in play, including one targeting rent caps for mobile home parks.

There’s also a push to expand Medicaid dental coverage, bolster pharmacy reimbursement rates, and keep rural dialysis clinics from shuttering. If that all sounds wonky, it is—but it’s also life-altering for people trying to keep their teeth, fill their prescriptions, or stay alive.

Efforts to address homelessness, overhaul land use laws, criminalize the fabrication and distribution of indecent photos using AI, requirements to create bell-to-bell cell phone restrictions inside public schools, and boost child care access are also on the move. These are the kinds of bills that legislators will either brag about in campaign flyers or pretend they never heard of, depending on how things go.

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Why the Exodus Happens Without You

It’s easy to tune this stuff out. Politics feels like background noise. You vote, and a few months later, laws happen. But that’s not how this works.

By the time a bill hits the floor for a vote, it’s already been kneaded, shaped, and trimmed behind the scenes. If you’re only paying attention when a bill is being debated on the House floor, you’ve already missed your best chance to influence it.

The real work—the kind that determines whether an idea lives or dies—happens in those early committee hearings. That’s where calls from constituents still matter. That’s where a compelling story can still move the needle.

If you wait until after the First Chamber Deadline to get involved, your voice is showing up at the funeral.

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The Stone Rolls On

Now that April 9 has passed, the survivors face a new gantlet in the other chamber. More hearings. More amendments. More hallway haggling. Some of these bills will emerge stronger. Some will collapse under their own weight. A few will be quietly put to sleep, never to be spoken of again.

And yes, some of the bills left behind will come back next year with a new title, a new champion, or a shiny new fiscal note attached. Ideas don’t stay buried in Salem. They just bide their time.

So keep watching. Keep asking questions. Keep showing up. If something matters to you—housing, health care, child care, taxes, regulation—the time to speak up isn’t when the final vote is cast. It’s now, while the wheels are still turning and the deals are still being made.

Until then, we’ll keep watch. Because here in Salem, even in the graveyard, nothing stays buried forever.