By Austin Fisher
KU Statehouse Wire Service
A bill that restricts university professors from using their titles in newspaper editorials garnered widespread media attention in February when critics suggested it effectively stifles public debate.
Rep. Virgil Peck (R-Tyro) introduced the bill but said he did not author it. The true author has not come forward, and isn’t required to do so.
In the first two months of the legislative session, lawmakers considered 627 bills without authors’ or sponsors’ names attached to them in the weekly Senate and House Actions Report. In the same period of the previous session, lawmakers introduced 852 bills without names.
Lawmakers refer to them as “committee bills” because that’s where the bill is introduced and receives a hearing, but it is common for legislation to be without formal sponsorship.
In a March 5 report, the Legislative Information Systems and Services office listed 47 nameless bills that came through the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Senate Judiciary Chairman and Senate Vice President Jeff King (R-Independence) said bills lacking individual names or organizations are par for the course.
“The majority of the bills in the legislature are committee bills,” King said. “That’s usually how people introduce them because the committee is where we do our work.”
Legislative procedure requires committees to work on bills under their jurisdiction and areas of expertise. Senate Minority Leader Anthony Hensley, a Topeka Democrat, said there are legitimate reasons for lawmakers to keep their names off of bills.
“Often legislators ask that a bill be introduced by a committee because sometimes having your name on it adversely impacts its chances of passage in a partisan way,” Hensley said.
Hensley said a bill with his name attached is unlikely to get support in a GOP-dominated legislature, regardless of its intent.
“They kill the messenger in the process,” he said.
Also, lawmakers can appease constituents by introducing bills that they might not necessarily agree with. These are labeled “by request.”
Massachusetts is the only state where citizens directly introduce bills, according to Brenda Erickson, a senior research analyst for the National Conference of State Legislatures.
In any given state legislature, it’s easy figure out which lawmaker brings a particular bill to a committee’s attention. Figuring out the inspiration for a bill is more difficult.
“A lawmaker just has to like the idea. Actual language may or may not come from model legislation,” Erickson said. “Ideas behind legislation can come from anywhere.”
Bob Beatty, a Washburn University political science professor, said some legislators might want to avoid attaching their name to a bill because of a conflict of interest.
“Legislators reflect the society from which they come. There’s going to be some bad actors,” Beatty said. “A bill which affects a certain industry may come out with a name attached, a name of a legislator whose campaign was funded by that same industry. That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be introduced, it means the citizens should get the whole story.”
The average bill is eight pages long and costs Legislative Administrative Services 14 cents to print. Normally, LAS makes 400 copies. 627 committee bills add up to an estimated $35,112 in printing costs.
That figure does not include the labor costs of drafting. Lawmakers take proposed legislation to the Office of Revisor of Statutes to put them in the proper legal language.
First Assistant Revisor of Statutes Jill Wolters said there is no accurate way to determine how many hours the Revisor’s Office staff spends drafting legislation, so comparing salaries to the number of bills drafted by the office wouldn’t be a truthful calculation.
“The amount of experience plays a huge role in the time it takes to draft the average bill,” Wolters said. “We have never said it takes ‘X’ number of hours to draft a bill so it costs ‘Y.’ We’ve never calculated it before.”
The House Judiciary committee, chaired by Rep. John Barker (R-Abilene), heard 53 nameless committee bills.
“Names can be deceiving,” Barker said. “Sometimes people introduce them for an organization.”
Senate Assistant Minority Leader Marci Francisco (D-Lawrence) said in other statehouses, lawmakers who are willing to introduce a bill often put their names on it.
“I think it would make sense to have some requirement in Kansas that a legislator be willing to identify as the person who introduced the bill, which is different than having your name on the bill,” Francisco said. “We shouldn’t be considering bills that an individual in the legislature or executive branch is not willing to be identified with.”
Rich Gannon, director of governmental affairs for the Kansas Press Association, agrees that lawmakers should be willing to take ownership of the bills they bring to the attention of the legislature.
“The concept of committee bill introductions has been around a long time but from time to time we are having great difficulty finding the true sponsor of a bill,” Gannon said. “More and more bills are introduced and referred around to other committees, and when it comes time to hold a hearing you really can’t find anyone taking responsibility and serving as a proponent.”
Beatty said the way ideas become law are just one small part of a broader lack of transparency in U.S. politics, which he said has become the biggest threat to American democracy.
“There are a number of aspects of secrecy in American politics that they would appreciate in Putin’s Russia,” Beatty said.
Austin Fisher is a University of Kansas senior from Lawrence majoring in journalism.