Y’all, FANTASTIC NEWS! Kentucky’s 2024 legislative session is OVER.
Now we get to chill for a hot sec until Kentucky’s primary election season starts to really ramp up (early voting starts in less than a month), and then the ~interim legislative session~ starts a few weeks after that.
Before we dive into the highlights of the final days of session, I owe y’all a quick apology for missing the Sunday newsletter earlier this week. I woke up Sunday morning to find out that my cat and I both managed to get some sort of stomach bug, and I still wasn’t up to newsletter writing energy by the normal newsletter writing time. My bad (Rari also apologizes for his role in the ordeal).
Since I’ve quit (kinda) Twitter (at least in a personal capacity) for the time being, please follow The Gallery Pass on Twitter so y’all get updates when stuff like this happens in the future.
OK, party time.
So, the last two days of Kentucky’s legislative session were Friday and Monday. Lawmakers actually wrapped things up a bit earlier than normal Monday evening, closing out the session by 9 p.m. instead of right before midnight. Good for them!
RIP, RIP DEI
They left a few things on the chamber floor, probably most notably Senate Bill 6 — their big anti-diversity, equity and inclusion in higher ed bill that was definitely gonna get vetoed by Gov. Andy Beshear had it passed in the last two days.
This bill was generally considered dead a few weeks ago, when lawmakers refused to vote on it in the Senate after the House radically overhauled the Senate’s tame-by-comparison initial version before the veto period started.
But then there were murmurs they’d try to vote on it in the last two days, which, had they passed it, would’ve offered the GOP a relatively rare legislative L by simply handing Beshear a chance to legally dunk on one of their priority bills without a chance to override his veto.
Lawmakers said the topic will likely come up during the interim session, but honestly, there will probably be another bogeyman topic that takes away their attention by the start of #KYGA25.
Latest epsiode of public shaming working
I’ll have a more in-depth list of bills that ended up not passing in a future newsletter, but one that got a lot of attention was House Bill 509, which would have changed/lowkey crippled the state’s open records law.
It drew both bipartisan disgust and support, with the Kentucky Press Association and conservative-leaning Americans for Prosperity speaking against it but with Beshear showing some support.
It also appeared to be one bill journalists actively employed and tasked with covering it were freely allowed to mock without risking their careers. See, kids, public shaming works!
It ended up dying in the Senate, RIP, long live transparency.
But have no fear, this is another thing that may come up in the interim session for more discussion ahead of the next legislative session.
But the veto overrides tho
As expected, lawmakers still overrode plenty of Beshear’s vetoes. Among them:
House Bill 5, the big GOP-backed public safety bill, was vetoed for a few different reasons, but Beshear said he didn’t actually hate all of it. (TBH, very few people did — even some of the staunchest haters said there were good pieces of the bill.)
The budget bills, which received several line-item vetoes across all 1534 different budget bills (ok, it was more like a half-dozen, but still).
Some of those line-item vetoes on House Bill 6, the main budget bill, actually were allowed to stand, though. So, if any of y’all were glad Beshear vetoed the parts about Coal Mine Reclamation Sites (listed/explained on page four of his veto message), congrats — they were the only ones to survive!
The resolution to create a task force to look into maybe breaking up JCPS will become a thing after the legislature overrode Beshear’s rejection. That task force will likely (hopefully) be a fun thing to cover during the interim, so stay tuned for that.
House Bill 388, which would, among other things, make some of Louisville’s largest local races nonpartisan, will also become a thing.
As always, you can see a full running list of both vetoed bills and veto overrides here, and you can see a similar list that also includes bills Beshear signs/lets slide by day here.
Assorted other highlights
The Momnibus bill ended up passing after it lost a controversial amendment that cost it some support…
While a last second push from Dems to force a Senate vote on a bill that would add a few tightly worded exceptions to Kentucky’s abortion ban failed. (But not without giving outgoing Senate Majority Floor Leader Damon Thayer one more chance to stick his finger in someone’s face.)
For the first time it was required that they do so, the Senate confirmed Robbie Fletcher as Kentucky’s next education commissioner.
Typically, the governor-appointed Kentucky Board of Education — aka the commish’s boss — has final say over the next commissioner. But a 2023 law made it so that the GOP-dominated Senate needs to approve their hire.
The Senate vote was 36-1 — with GOP Sen. Donald Douglas being the lone no vote.
Fletcher, who currently leads Lawrence County’s schools, is slated to start July 1.
What’s next?
Beshear still has some time to veto anything lawmakers passed in the last two days, but he cannot veto an override of his veto.
Anything that has been signed into law (or became law over Beshear’s veto or without his signature), unless it has an emergency clause, generally goes into effect at the end of June.
It is also now primary election season, so don’t forget to register to vote if you aren’t already registered. You have until 4 p.m. local time on April 22 to register. You can register to vote here.
One thing about the primaries: Kentucky has closed primaries, so you have to be registered as a Republican or a Democrat in order to vote. To the 10% of Kentuckians who register third-party, sorry.
2 days until Taylor Swift drops The Tortured Poets Department (April 19)
5 days until the deadline to register to vote in Kentucky’s primary elections (April 22)
17 days until the 150th Kentucky Derby (May 4)
34 days until Kentucky’s 2024 Primary Election (May 21)
38 days until the inaugural Gazebo Fest (May 25-26)
108 days until Fancy Farm 2024 (August 3)
265 days until Kentucky’s 2025 legislative session (Jan. 7, 2025)
Thanks for hanging around for the entire session, y’all. Some of us barely survived (me) but we (technically) survived nonetheless.
I still plan on writing the newsletter twice a week, but it may look a lil different.
I’ll be spending some time over the next few days brainstorming things to talk about over the next few weeks. Got any ideas? Reach out to me - you should be able to respond directly to this email and have it land in my inbox, or skip the uncertainty and go straight to olivia.krauth@gmail.com.
ok, toodles!