Wednesday is crossover day. It’s the last chance for a bill started in one chamber to gain approval and be up for consideration by the other side. If that doesn’t happen, the measures die.
In the 2015 session, South Dakota lawmakers introduced 429 bills. That’s not counting resolutions. 236 measures are House Bills. 193 come from the Senate. But if any one of those is to survive the week, the bill has to gain approval from its original chamber by Wednesday. That’s crossover day.
Jason Hancock is the director of the Legislative Research Council. He says cross-over day ensures all lawmakers have adequate time to consider potential new laws.
"If you didn’t have a crossover day deadline, you could have legislation sitting in one house all session long and the other chamber wouldn’t necessarily even know that that legislation was going anywhere, and you could have it come flying across on the last day of session, and they wouldn’t really have time to properly consider it," Hancock says.
Hancock says that gives lawmakers from the second chamber a chance to research, discuss and vote on the bills from the other side. Sometimes, they change legislation, too.
"And then the original chamber may not agree with those amendments and then you have a conference committee where they negotiate over the changes that have been made to the bill and hopefully come to some sort of a compromise or resolution on what they’re going to move forward with," Hancock says.
Because legislation dies if the original house doesn’t pass it Wednesday, afternoon floor sessions will likely run long as lawmakers move through debate and votes on many measures.
