Filing Day One Ends the Way It Began — Fast: 1,160 Bills by Mid-Afternoon and a Divided Legislature Showing Its Hand
Medicaid nine ways, a wage floor seven ways, voucher repeals six ways — and two repeal bills with Republican names on them. The 90th Legislature's first day of paperwork is a map of the session to come.
AUSTIN — The first day of bill filing for the 90th Texas Legislature moved at the speed the Capitol expected and then some. About 340 measures landed in the first two hours after the window opened at 8 a.m. Monday. By noon the count stood at almost 970. By 2 p.m., the Texas Tribune's tally passed 1,160 bills filed — for a session that does not convene until Jan. 12. For scale, the record-setting first day for the last Legislature, in 2024, produced 1,511 bills and resolutions; filing this year runs through March 12, and the members elected last week cannot file anything until they are sworn in on opening day.
The shape of the pile is the story. An evening tally by the advocacy publication Lone Star Left counted nine separate bills to expand Medicaid, seven bills to raise the state minimum wage to somewhere between $15 and $17, six bills to repeal the school voucher program enacted last session, three bills to repeal the abortion ban alongside two proposed constitutional amendments, and three bills to legalize cannabis — a Democratic agenda filed like a majority party's, in a House Democrats now control, aimed at a Senate Republicans still hold and a governor's office that changed parties last week.
Not everything in the pile ran along party lines. Republican Sen. Joan Huffman's SB 293, which would repeal tax breaks for data centers, drew 23 senators as signatories, and data-center limits drew bills from both parties through the day, along with at least three bills to rein in automated license-plate cameras. HB 824, a repeal of the state's Moving Image Incentive Program for film production, was noted approvingly by both a Republican House member and the Democratic publication counting the day's filings — the rare measure both ends of the building seem happy to kill.
The day's most prolific filers, per the same tally, were Lalani with 68 bills, Zaffirini with 66, Bucy with 58 and Menendez with 54. Most of what was filed Monday will never become law — that is the Legislature's normal arithmetic, and this desk has reported the individual measures with real movement behind them separately, including the ICE-cooperation repeal bills (HB 123 and SB 99) and HB 126. What day one reliably does is show the building's intentions early. On Monday, both parties showed theirs.
