Weekly Legislative Update #6

We want to provide you with our most recent update on what happened at the Capitol this past week, each bill’s current status, and what to expect next week. As mentioned before, if you ever have questions about a particular bill, feel free to email us at mark@ndfamilyalliance.org or call 701-355-6425.

Last Week

As anticipated, submitting testimony is phasing out for us and we are spending more time these days focusing on floor votes and letting you know when your voice needs to be heard on critical bills. We testified in favor of two military-related bills last week. One would designate an official Prisoner of War and Missing in Action Day (HB 1403), and the other would officially establish Military Appreciation Month (HB 1148). A couple of other testimonies we submitted were on resolutions. One was to conduct a human trafficking study (HCR 3028) and the other was to tell Washington DC that they need to overturn the Obergefell v. Hodges SCOTUS ruling which legalized same-sex marriage (HCR 3013).

As already noted, we also spent more time focusing on floor votes and asking for your help in contacting legislators to influence their voting. Bills that passed in their respective chambers once again included many focused on education, such as human trafficking education for students (SB 2330), further preventing child access to obscene books in libraries, including school libraries (SB 2307), school compliance with the Century Code (SB 2104), and saying the Pledge of Allegiance in school (HB 1222). Also, HB 1181, which would define gender as a person’s biological sex, passed overwhelmingly in the House.

Next Week

Hundreds of remaining bills will come up for floor votes next week since crossover begins at the end of next week. These include all of the bills that don't have floor votes shown in our table, below. We will monitor these bills carefully and if we see one in danger of being voted on in the wrong direction, we will send out one of our Call-to-Action Alerts (CTAs) which allows you to contact as many legislators as necessary with a click of the button, as appropriate. As we’ve stated before, there are sometimes just a few hours between when we find out about a floor vote and it actually happens, so please respond to these CTAs as soon as you can. If good bills don’t make it out of their initial chamber, they are dead for the 2025 legislative session and no other action will be taken on them, so there is a lot riding on these votes that will happen next week.


Current Status

In the table below for this week, we wanted to provide you with the status of all of the bills we have worked on so far. Each bill’s most recent status is shown in the following table. 

To double-check the most current status of any bill, you can go to this page, type the bill number into the upper right box (just need the number, not the HB or SB), and click the search button. Once you are on the bill’s page, click on the tab entitled “Actions”. This will indicate where the bill is in the process.

How to Take Action

1.) If a bill hearing has been scheduled, but not yet held, the table shows the date, time, and location of the hearing. If you want to testify, you need to write your comments about the bill into a PDF or txt file. This can be a paragraph or longer, but keep to the point. Once that is written, you can go to this page, type the bill number into the upper right box (just need the number, not the HB or SB), and click the search button. Once you are on the bill’s page, click on the tab entitled “Hearings”, identify the hearing, and click the link on the right where it says, “Submit Testimony”. Just follow the instructions after that. Note that there will be a deadline to submit testimony for bills, often early in the morning on the hearing day (this will show once you click on the “Submit Testimony” link). If you have questions about any of this, prepare your testimony document and then call us at 701-355-6425 and we can walk you through it.

2.) If the bill hearing is over, but it still needs to be voted on in a chamber, you can contact your appropriate legislator(s) and give them feedback. If you do not know who your legislators are or how to contact them, click here and then go to the top right corner and click on “Find my legislator.” Type your house number and zip code into the boxes and click the search button. From there, you should be able to find your Senator and Representatives and all their contact information such as phone numbers and email addresses.
 
3.) If the bill has passed both chambers and has been sent to Gov. Armstrong, you can contact the Governor via this link and provide input on the bill. Contact Governor Armstrong

Please remember to be respectful in all communications to our legislators and the Governor, and feel free to contact us with any legislative questions.

Here is a map of the Capitol, so you can find the indicated rooms. Please let us know if you have any questions.