Y’all, things are about to get fun in Frankfort.
After a perhaps somewhat predictably slow yet well-paced start to Kentucky’s 2026 legislative session, we are about to start the second half of session this week.
I’m expecting (OK, maybe wishing for) more of the traditional Frankfort energy — the chaos, the contentious bills, the controversial last-second committee switcheroos, the crazed rush to get things through before the veto period.
Expect the pace to pick up, for longer evenings, for late bill filings and sudden major changes.
Here are some of the top things I’m watching, pondering, thinking, etc. heading into the last 30 days of session.
Have the culture wars been called off?
Why are we not fighting over something yet? It feels like we should be fighting over something.
But we haven’t really seen too many bills aimed at stuff like DEI, drag queens, LGBTQ+ issues and rights, etc. A few have been filed, but they haven’t gone far.
I keep side-eyeing the wall. Something feels sus. Was there some big anti-culture wars announcement I missed? Someone tell me.
And, yes, I know it says a lot that the main thing I’m finding weird about this session is the lack of yelling and harmful legislation inspired by bogeymen. It’s so normalized that its absence is a red flag with a raised eyebrow.
What actually will be in the budget?
No, seriously. Literally the one thing lawmakers have to do is pass a two-year budget.
We have the budget bill — House Bill 500 — which GOP leaders called a bare bones budget and said to expect changes. The budget process is always a long process with a lot of back-and-forth, changes and deciding things in conference committees in the final days.
But it feels as if we’re taking a bit longer on this than we typically do, and time is (slowly) starting to run out. And typically when Frankfort gets into a rush, public transparency and time for meaningful debate are the first things to go.
Public educators remain 💅 on it 💅
One of the main things to watch: How the budget ultimately treats public educators.
The current version of HB 500 freezes education funding and slashes school transportation funding, meaning local districts will again need to make up the difference. And there’s been a lot of concerns around state employees’ health benefits, which, if the budget bill doesn’t adjust it, could jump a whole lot in price.
Of course, this has caused some of the good ole tension between the GOP-dominated legislature and public servants that I cover basically every session.
Educators and other public employee groups rallied the troops and contacted their lawmakers, with some of the lawmakers ultimately sharing their lengthy responses to budget and benefit concerns on Facebook that can generally be summed up as “Please remember this is not the final budget!”
Which priorities will be prioritized?
At this point, several of each chamber’s top priority bills — those numbered 1 to 10 — have cleared their chamber of origin. But they’ve stalled since then.
Now, snagging a top bill placement doesn’t guarantee anything, especially not once it gets to the other chamber. Like, Sen. Chris McDaniel has been trying to curb the governor’s pardon powers for years, and the House has not been having it.
On the Senate side, the priority bills I’m following most are the public education ones, which is, like, half of them. I’m most interested in Senate Bill 1, the let’s-give-the-school-board’s-power-to-the-JCPS-superintendent bill. This has been a big focus for the Senate GOP, but maybe a little less so in the House.
On the House side, I’m mainly focused on House Bill 4, the anti-grooming bill. It passed unanimously but has yet to get a Senate committee assignment.
And what about the non-priority priorities?
Child care access, justice reforms, AI, data centers, housing, Medicaid: A ton of big priorities for the legislature (and the public) have big, wonky bills filed and are starting to slowly move through the legislative process.
A lot of these types of bills are the result of years of work and discussions and task force meetings, but even then, it can be a heavy lift to get some of these over the finish line. And with the budget taking up so much space this year, I get the sense we’ll see even less of these pass or even gain traction than normal.
Things feel a bit more high-stakes this year, between federal changes and the economy and the looming AI overseers hoping to take over the world, so it’ll be interesting to see what exactly gets through.
Deja vu re: crippling local control over public education
We’ve had an undercurrent of bills trying to change who has control over their public schools, and just how much control they have, and whether or not we like public schools, and if we like them, do we like all of them or maybe just some?
This is nothing new, but it feels like it has fresh energy and momentum this year in part because JCPS and FCPS have been lowkey clusters.
We’ve discussed bills to strip Louisville and Lexington voters’ ability to decide who is on their school boards, and give the JCPS Superintendent more power (even though he doesn’t want it).
We’ve also got a bill that would make SBDM councils — school-based councils that were a critical, and perhaps the only remaining, piece of Kentucky’s big overhaul of education sparked by the Rose decision — more advisory than being a driving force behind school decisions. I’m old enough to remember when going after SBDMs was a big thing for the legislature, and apparently they’re bringing it back.
And we’ve got a few other school board bills like one to allow school board members to be recalled, and to make school boards be based on the size of the district. (For example, JCPS’ board would go from 7 to 15 members.)
There’s also been a resolution supporting school boards.
The general vibe thus far is confusing. Is the goal to expand school boards to include more voices, and give the public more say over who sits on them; or is it to strip power from as many people as possible (including the voters) and centralize the bulk of the school-related decision-making with a handful of people who are not directly accountable to the public for those decisions?
Which one are we gonna go with? Are any of these bills gonna actually pass?
(And don’t think I’ve forgotten about the bill to break up JCPS!)
Um, so, are you gonna, like, file that one thing?
We still have about two weeks until the bill filing deadline, so I’m expecting a decent amount of important, new stuff to drop.
I’m also watching some lawmakers to see if they actually file some bills they promised they would. I will not be naming names at this time.
When do bills start dying?
And, when they do, can I join them?
Momentum also doesn’t guarantee anything; things rise from the dead at the last second all the time in Frankfort. But momentum does help. And we’re nearing the point in session where stalling will soon be an early signal of death.
And we can’t even really calculate when exactly the death march begins because we could still make up that snow day. But generally it looks like if a bill hasn’t started moving at all by maybe March 23, that’s bad.
But March 23 is a long, long time away.
Will I ever make it back to Frankfort?
I regret to inform the collective that my dearly beloved Morticia the Mitsubishi Outlander has informed me that she no longer dreams of labor.
(My car’s transmission is suddenly and rapidly deteriorating, and will not go above ~64 mph and will not go up hills and will not drive for more than ~20 collective minutes.)
This horrific news led me to learn even more terrifying news: Louisville’s Mitsubishi dealership silently shut down, and so did the one in Southern Indiana.
So, my car is being towed to a Mitsubishi dealership in *checks notes* Radcliff and soon we will know if she can be fixed/if she is worth fixing. Please pray for me, for Morticia, for the Mitsubishi folks in Radcliff.
Do not expect to see me in Frankfort for a hot sec while I deal with this.
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