In the 2026 legislative session, lawmakers — primarily Republicans — have introduced a whopping, record-shattering 2,118 bills as of yesterday.
While the number of bills filed has been increasing steadily over the years, the jump from last year’s 1,854 bills to this year’s total was substantial.1
But that doesn’t mean your elected officials are getting more done than ever this year.
The vast majority of those bills are guaranteed to die by one of two primary causes: not being heard in a committee hearing, or meeting Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs’ veto stamp. (Last year, Hobbs signed 265 bills and vetoed 174.)
We used Skywolf, our legislation tracking service, to break down this year’s horde of bills with some stats that make it easier to understand what’s really going on at the Capitol — and how many of those more than 2,000 bills really matter.
But first, let’s talk about a key deadline lawmakers are facing tomorrow.
It’s the last day that bills can be passed out of committees, a hurdle they must clear to be considered by the House of Representatives or the Senate.2 If a bill doesn’t pass committee now, it’s probably dead. Last year, half of all bills didn’t make it past this bottleneck.
Similarly, tomorrow’s deadline will result in the demise of most of the bills filed this year. We’ll also see a few marathon committee sessions this week in which chairs try to pass as many bills as possible.
“Bills need to be heard to give the public input, to allow sponsors to be able to be exposed to problems that may need correction, and, if the governor vetoes the bill, (that lets lawmakers see) where the governor stood on the issue,” Republican Sen. John Kavanagh said about the last push to hear as many bills as possible.
For instance, the Senate Judiciary and Elections Committee is scheduled to consider at least 57 bills before the end of the week — much of which will happen on Friday, a day lawmakers usually have off. It’s one last plunge into the wide sea of bills.
Of course, there is a way around the deadline — it’s called a “strike-everything amendment,” or a “striker bill.”3
Lawmakers can propose amendments to a bill that entirely replaces its language with new and sometimes unrelated policy. Expect plenty of Republican efforts to put brand new language into bills, kind of like a Trojan horse made of clear glass.
Next week is "crossover week," when things get busy on the floor of both chambers as lawmakers attempt to move as many bills as possible from one chamber to the next.
There will be all-day voting marathons, busy caucus meetings and floor sessions running so long that by the end, lawmakers sometimes get confused about what they’re voting on.
After tomorrow’s deadline it becomes much harder to get a bill to the floor, so it’s a noteworthy date. On that note, we’ll take the opportunity to break down this year’s bills, by the numbers.
Republicans v. Democrats
Of the 2,118 bills introduced this year, more than two-thirds came from Republicans. That’s typical given the power dynamic. Unless Democratic bills have broad bipartisan support — as well as the support of the chairs of the committees that are assigned to hear them — they’re not likely to get any traction, disincentivizing the minority party from filing a ton of bills.
Most bills filed
Clocking in with 73 bills, this year’s top filer is the ever-industrious Republican Sen. John Kavanagh.
“We should be paid by the bill,” Kavanagh told us via text.
The five most active bill filers were Republicans, which is unsurprising since the GOP controls both chambers.
Fewest bills filed
Similarly, it’s no surprise that the least active bill filers were Democrats, given that their bills are unlikely to be heard by committee chairs. Rep. Elda Luna-Nájera and Rep. Lupe Contreras were the sole lawmakers who only filed a single bill. Interestingly, GOP Rep. Beverly Pingerelli cracked the bottom five bill filers, introducing only three bills.
Most bills moved by a Republican
A handful of Republican lawmakers have already had great success getting their bills out of committee and prepped for next week’s marathon floor sessions.
The Republican with the greatest number of bills on the move is Rep. Gail Griffin, the chair of the House Natural Resources, Energy & Water Committee. She’s notorious for pretty much only hearing her own bills in that committee.
Out of the 59 bills that Griffin sponsored, 50 have already passed their assigned committee(s). GOP Sen. Wendy Rogers isn’t far behind — of the 61 bills she filed this year, 43 had already cleared their assigned committee(s) as of Wednesday evening.
Most bills moved by a Democrat
It’s extremely rare for a Democrat-sponsored bill to go anywhere. While a handful of Democratic lawmakers have a single bill that’s made it out of the Rules Committee in one chamber, Rep. Alma Hernandez has double that. The Tucson lawmaker’s two bills that have been advanced would create a study committee for a rental assistance program and make updates to local justice courts systems.
Not a single Democrat-sponsored bill has passed the full chamber in the House or Senate to date.
Most strikers
We mentioned that lawmakers use sneaky “striker” bills to introduce new language into often-unrelated legislation.
As of Wednesday evening, 36 strikers have been proposed, and another 26 have been adopted. The most frequent striker users are Republican Rep. Julie Willoughby and Sen. Jake Hoffman, who have each sponsored three bills that have been struck through with totally new language.
But there’s another side of that coin: Lawmakers introduce technical correction bills — or “vehicle bills” — that make minor, unnecessary changes to state law.
It’s a way to hedge a bet that they’ll need a “vehicle” for a future striker bill.
Of the 72 technical correction bills that have been filed this year, Republican Rep. Alex Kolodin has sponsored the most, with eight. Nerds will be nerds.
It’s also worth noting that Kolodin’s colleagues dragged him last year for filing a grand total of 74 bills, then having the gall to introduce a last-minute rule change that would have limited lawmakers to filing only seven bills per year each.
No nukes needed: The Republican-controlled Maricopa County Board of Supervisors did not fire Republican County Recorder Justin Heap yesterday, a nuclear option that some supervisors had hinted that they could take, which then took off on MAGA Twitter as proof that the crooked board was trying to oust him. But the supervisors did give him a stern talking to at yesterday’s special meeting before closing with a resolution to declare that they’re close to a resolution on the matter. The dust-up stems from their fight over the division of labor between the board and the recorder when it comes to elections, but ramped up after members of Heap’s staff, which is full of election deniers, claimed the county had disenfranchised voters.
The new ICE age: Republicans in a state Senate committee delayed until tomorrow a vote on a strike-everything amendment to require counties to set up a deal to put ICE agents at polling places, which would be illegal. Despite the certain veto it will face if it makes it to the Governor’s Office, the bill is getting a lot of press, in part because people think President Donald Trump might enact some sort of executive order of questionable legality to do the same thing. Meanwhile, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a letter to tribal nations that ICE doesn’t target Native Americans. She called the verified and video-recorded incidents of ICE detaining Native American tribal members “false” and “misinformation,” per Indian Country Today.
What’s worse than an Amazon warehouse?: Surprise residents are still mad about the federal plans for a massive ICE detention facility in an old warehouse. They showed up to the Town Council on Tuesday to tell the council that they don’t want the thing in their town, per the Republic’s Elena Santa Cruz. They’re not the only town facing an unwanted human warehouse, States Newsroom’s Kevin Hardy writes, but locals have few tools to fight the federal incursion.
PLEEEEEAAAASE, MOM: Republican Rep. Selina Bliss’ bill to create a monument honoring murdered journalist Don Bolles (sans the Charlie Kirk add-on that Republican Sen. Jake Hoffman wants) passed the House Government Committee with unanimous support yesterday. That means there are two versions of the bill moving through the Legislature: a good bill that everyone likes, and a shitty version that Democrats and even members of Bolles’ family don’t want.
“This bill feels like when my 11-year-old, my baby, just asks me for something over and over and over, and after many ‘no’s’ I say ‘fine,’” Republican Rep. Rachel Keshel told her colleagues.
We’ve been asking over and over and over for you to support local journalism with a paid subscription. Just say “fine” and click the button.
National parks get based: Historians, conservationists and park rangers filed a lawsuit accusing the Trump administration of censoring exhibits at national parks across the country, including in Arizona, the Republic’s Taylor Seely writes. Among the local displays that were censored are the following:
Pro tip to whoever is stinking up Republican Sen. JD Mesnard’s neighborhood with the sweet smell of ganja: Stuff a bunch of dryer sheets into a paper towel roll and blow your smoke through that.
Otherwise, you risk turning the rest of us into criminals.
Mesnard filed legislation to make it a crime — punishable by up to four months in jail — to stink up his neighborhood with legal weed, as Capitol scribe Howie Fischer explains in this article, which wins best lede of the week for this line:
“Someone in J.D. Mesnard’s Chandler neighborhood smokes marijuana,” Fischer writes.
You can almost imagine the local stoner scrolling the news and getting the freak-outs.
We also loved Mesnard’s explanation that cigar smoke isn’t included in the bill because he seems to think you can get high just by smelling marijuana at a distance.
“I’m pretty sure that marijuana smoke has a different impact than, say, other smoke that might make you cough,” Mesnard said. “I don’t want my kids to get high.”
Finally, after reading this quote, we’re half convinced that he just smoked up his garage and got caught and had to create a whole bill to cover his ass.
“It can even creep into your own house or, in my case, into my garage,” he told Fischer.
1 For the first time ever, one chamber introduced more than 1,000 bills, forcing the Legislature to take up a new numbering scheme. Senate bills start at SB1001, and House bills start at 2001. This year, the House also has bills numbered in the 4000s.
2 The deadline doesn’t apply to the appropriations committees, which deal with budget bills, and rules committees, which vet bills for constitutionality and every bill must go through
3 And lawmakers can and frequently do just waive the rules to allow for late introduction of bills.