State lawmakers are spending the next month getting ready for the new legislative session beginning this month, lining up committee assignments and preparing the proposals they’ll introduce.
A bird’s eye view of the two-year session that just wrapped up in November finds that a total of 369 proposals were enacted.
House lawmakers introduced 3,610 measures (and 1,091 resolutions), and senators introduced 1,981 proposals (and more than 500 resolutions).
Gov. Tom Corbett approved nearly everything that graced his desk, breaking out the line-item veto for one budget-related bill this year. A spokesman said he was unaware of any other veto action from the governor in his entire term.
With 369 bills passed, the last two years of Corbett’s term were slightly less productive than the first two, when he signed 373 bills into law.
For the past two decades, governors have averaged some 300 bills approved every legislative session.
The open question going into next year is whether the Republican-dominated Legislature will clash so much with the Democratic Governor-elect Tom Wolf that it results in an end-of-session bill count far below average.
