Last week and this week are known as ‘crossover weeks’ when most committees don’t meet to clear everyone’s calendar for floor votes. Days were quite long last week with the House of Representatives spending 12 hours voting on bills one day last week.
The only committee that met last week was the Senate Committee on Director Nominations, a newly formed special committee to evaluate Governor Hobbs’ nominees to lead state agencies (see my op-ed on my opinion about that committee’s work: Senate committee doesn’t ‘vet’ nominees. It sabotages them
There were three nominations on the agenda—the Department of Transportation (ADOT), the Department of Administration (ADOA), and the Department of Environmental Quality (ADEQ)—but only the ADOT and ADOA nominees were considered, and only the ADOT nominee was recommended for a vote by the full Senate.
After the Senate Committee voted against former ADHS Director nominee Dr. Theresa Cullen and with the record from this week’s hearing, we can expect a challenging road ahead for all of Governor Hobbs’ nominees.
The ‘Third Read’ (floor vote) calendar in the House tomorrow is a mile long – looks like it could be another 12-hour day? Calendars || Bill Status Inquiry. Monday’s calendar in the Senate is a lot shorter right now but could get a lot bigger (although there are far more House bills than Senate bills owing to the fact there twice as many members of the House as the Senate.
Here’s our Bill Tracking Spreadsheet for this week
Now that the conference is over, I hope to have more time to do a more narrative analysis of bills in next week’s update.
