Filing Deadline Has Passed
Now we have 1,400 bills to look through
February 7th was the filing deadline for legislation in Tennessee, so it’s been a busy week at the legislature. Exactly 1,400 bills are filed in the House, 1,426 in the Senate, and almost 300 resolutions between houses. Not counting duplicate bills, this is somewhere north of 5,000 pages of text that may become part of Tennessee law in the next three months.
Dozens of nonprofits, special interest groups, and news outlets have started analyzing legislation and publishing their findings. We know you could be reading any or all of those, and you’ve chosen to read our newsletter. So to make the most of your time, we’ll limit our coverage to bills that pass two simple tests:
It needs to be passable. Dozens of bills are filed each year which have no hope of passage. They will never become law. As a lobbying group that’s been active in the state legislature for six years, we have a pretty good idea of which bills these are and which legislators will sponsor them. We want to focus knowledge and effort where it matters, so we’ll be highlighting bills that we think have at least a 50/50 chance of passage.
It needs to affect you, or people you know. Hundreds of bills are filed every year that bump around dates for filing paperwork, or create new sunsets on state boards you’ve never heard of, or make mundane changes to government. Most of these will pass. Most of them won’t change how you live, or affect you in any way. If you’re going to take the time out of your busy life to learn about things happening in the state government, we want to show you things that may actually impact you.
These two tests fall neatly into TFI’s mission. We’re a lobbying organization, so it’s our job to know what’s possible at the legislature — which legislators are on the outs and won’t pass anything, which issues have been beaten to death, which things may fly under the radar while a bigger fish is taking everyone’s time.
But as a nonprofit, we’re also passionate about the part of governance that practically affects the people of the state — things like taxes, personal freedoms, or the sticky intersection between public safety and individual responsibility. We’re not a business, so we almost never encounter an issue that may affect our bottom line, where a financial incentive might crowd out a moral or philosophical one. We’re regular people, interested in regular things, and we want to know when the government may impact our lives in some new way.
So let’s look at some bills that pass these tests.
HB521 — Would reduce taxes on wholesale beer and soft drinks, and provide for the eventual repeal of such taxes. If passed, it would probably reduce the cost of beer by about 2%.
HB537 — Would clarify that it’s acceptable to show a police officer a digital proof of car registration. If passed, you could store your registration on your phone instead of in your glove box.
HB552 — Would allow parents to home-school their children without making any notification to the state, performing any assessments, or following any state-mandated curriculum. If passed, parents would be free to educate their children in the way they think is best.
HB559 — Would make it so that it’s no longer a crime to hold your phone while driving a car. It would still be illegal to text, watch videos, or record videos while driving.
HB562 — Would make it unlawful for any government official to declare a lawful occupation “non-essential”, and therefore prohibit someone from engaging in that occupation. If passed, this would prevent the executive branch from declaring occupations non-essential like they did during the early days of the pandemic.
HB571 — Defines terms like Man, Woman, Male, Female, and Sex — defining “sex” as “an individual’s biological sex, either male or female, as observed or clinically verified at birth”. If passed, states that Domestic Violence Shelters, Schools, Juvenile Detention Facilities, and Correctional Facilities would have separate sleeping, changing, and bathroom areas for separate sexes.
HB574 — Would require that forms of identification used to vote in the state be valid and unexpired. Would prohibit registering to vote unless you have valid and unexpired identification.
HB592 — Would allow people who were wrongfully imprisoned and whose charges were later dismissed and their sentences vacated to make a claim for compensation. Would also allow a spouse or children to make a claim, in the case that a person who was wrongfully imprisoned has died before filing a claim.
HB597 — Would require that paid lobbyists keep a list with the Tennessee Ethics Commission of all the bills they are being paid to oppose or support.