On Monday, lawmakers from both chambers met to kick off the first of the legislative session’s conference committee meetings, where they duke out differences in various bills as passed by the House and the Senate.
Essentially, after a bill passes the House and Senate, three things can happen:
1. If a bill does not have any amendments in the second chamber—a House-passed bill in the Senate, or vice versa—it goes straight to the governor’s desk.
2. If a bill has been amended in the second chamber, it goes back to the first chamber where members can vote to concur with the changes in the amended bill and send it to the governor.
3. If there is no concurrence, the bill can be sent to a conference committee, where one Senate Democrat, one Senate Republican, one House Democrat and one House Republican—called “conferees”—meet to find a version of the bill that is agreeable to lawmakers. The leaders of both chambers have the option of removing members and replacing them with others in order to reach consensus in conference committees.
If they do not come to an agreement, the bill dies. If they can nail down a final version, the bill goes back to both chambers for a vote, and if passed by both, it gets sent to Gov. Eric Holcomb, where he can either choose to sign the bill into law, veto it or simply let it pass after a seven-day deadline.
Holcomb traditionally always signs or vetoes bills, not usually letting them pass without review.
Monday’s meetings brought extremely short discussions surrounding insurance, transportation for released inmates, juvenile law, robotics programming in schools, and drug repositories. Andrew Downs, the director of the Mike Downs Center for Indiana Politics at Purdue University, said these meetings are sometimes purely administrative, causing them to be so short.
However, this isn’t always the case.
Calling conference committees a “magical place,” Downs said “so many things can happen there.”
A few years ago, he said he was following an education bill out of personal interest. The bill made it to a conference committee and then was voted through. When he looked the next day to see what changes had been made, he said the bill looked completely different.
“I was lucky enough in that I knew one of the conferees well enough that I could call the person and say, ‘Hey, what the heck happened?’ You know, I wasn't trying to get anybody in trouble, I was just curious,” Downs said.
“The response I got was, ‘Oh, I know what you're talking about. It was a bill that no one was that concerned about or not excited about. But there was a conferee who had an education bill that had not had much traction … It was germane to the topic in that it was also education related. So the conferees were like, ‘OK, good enough.’”
Essentially, in a conference committee that could have lasted five minutes just as the ones on Monday did, lawmakers were able to add in a whole other bill that hadn’t passed, simply because it was also an education bill and they all agreed on it.
“So hence, it’s a magical place where anything can happen,” Downs said with a laugh.
Many of these committee meetings will pop up as lawmakers approach the end of the legislative session, which is required to end this year by April 29.
Here is a chart of the 143 bills of the 2023 legislative session that have been amended and need further review by lawmakers in conference meetings.
As of Monday, Holcomb has signed 14 bills, the most notable being Senate Bill 480, which banned gender-affirming procedures and medication for minors.