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How a bill becomes a law

On Tuesday, representatives in the Arkansas House met to start the special session by reading Gov. Asa Hutchinson's call. The House and Senate voted to approved proposed tax cuts by the governor.
Arkansas House
The Arkansas House of Representatives chamber

Just a few weeks into the legislative session, Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders has already signed into law a few bills passed by lawmakers. But the path each law takes before it makes it to the governor's desk can at times be convoluted.

If you take the elevator up to the fourth floor of the Arkansas State Capitol, you can sit in the public viewing galleries high above both the House and Senate.

From that angle you can watch every floor session, like a spectator at the zoo or a businessman looking at the street from a skyscraper. And if you don't want to drive downtown, the Capitol live streams all public meetings, and all floor proceedings on their website.

State legislators in Arkansas come from 35 Senate districts and 100 House districts, representing millions of people. Every other year, they gather for at least 60 days to pass laws. Always colleagues, sometimes friends, last session, in 2023, they passed 890 laws.

Most bills run through legislative bases quickly, because as Senate Minority Leader Greg Leding, D-Fayetteville, explains, most aren't controversial.

“Most of what we pass isn't like big huge sweeping changes,” he said. “A lot of them are just minor updates to existing laws. That's a lot of what we do.”

And so many laws only affect a small group of people. Bills update best practice guidelines for certain licenses or making technical corrections to something like the state pension law. There is a big batch of individual funding laws for each state department.

And then you have symbolic legislation, like resolutions congratulating sports teams or condemning violence overseas. Last session, for example, a law paying for the health care of the state's one retired police dog, Rino, passed in a few days.

But, how does a bill become a law in Arkansas?

First, it starts in the drafting stage. This is where state lawmakers lean on the help of the Bureau of Legislative Research, or the BLR. The nonpartisan group makes sure the language in bills is up to snuff.

“They may pull old code to see if there is any overlap or unintended redundancies,” said University of Arkansas political science professor John Clark Davis.

After it gets an “okay” from the BLR, the bill is voted on about four times. First a committee, then either the House or the Senate, another committee, and then the other chamber.

At this point, the governor can veto the bill instead of signing it. This is rare, because it's pretty easy in Arkansas to override a veto. You only need a simple majority.

“If everybody votes the exact same way they voted the first time, it will be overridden,” Davis said.

Many of the bills the legislature passes get approved in the last few days of session. These spring days are often a mad sprint, the political equivalent of cramming for a midterm.

“Part of it is just the way the legislature is structured,” Sen. Leding said. “Part of it is just procrastination. Sometimes you just simply dont get a bill ready to run until late in the session.”

Gail Choate runs the Arkansas Civic Action Group, a nonpartisan organization encouraging people to get involved in the legislative process.

“It's not just a question of a legislature having and Idea and boom its voted on by the entire general assembly,” she said. “The reality is it has to make its way through the committee process. And that gives us a lot of opportunities for input.”

She says if you don't like a bill, contact your senators and representatives now, before they make up their mind and dig in.

“Because that's one of the things they are always afraid of. They don't want to be accused of being indecisive or waffeling on an issue.”

Choate says the most persuasive arguments are often made by people who set aside their emotion, who base their arguments on a blend of logic and stories.

“People will come to give public testimony and they are very invested and they’re very emotional and they have some very deep seated personal stories to tell, but they get so wrapped up in the emotion that people quit listening to them.”

The story of the Arkansas Legislature in 2025 is of a safe haven for conservative policies, since Republicans hold every statewide office and have supermajorities in both legislative chambers. Davis says Arkansas is “historically a one party state.”

He said the state has changed in recent decades, in that it switched from blue to red — also the title of his book. And this leaves Democrats with virtually no power.

In debating Arkansas LEARNS in 2023, former Sen. Linda Chesterfield, D-Little Rock, read from the Serenity Prayer. She said that was emblematic of what it was like to speak against legislation she knew would pass despite her negative feelings.

“I know that I can not change the votes of the individuals in this room,” she said “But I would be remiss if I did not say process matters.”

And current Senate Minority Leader Greg Leding has a similar perspective.

“You might get really pissed off at somebody,” he said. “But you vote and you have to move on.”

The idea of “whipping votes” is almost non-existent when the group is that small, and the power so limited. Leding says it is hard to count the wins.

So Democrats do their best to oppose bills by giving good effort speeches. Meanwhile, for the rest of the winter months, we can expect Republicans to efficiently move bill after bill through the system.

Josie Lenora is the Politics/Government Reporter for Little Rock Public Radio.