Bills limiting gubernatorial power pass in first week of 2021 session
Many of the bills that passed both chambers of the Kentucky General Assembly during the just-completed first week of the 2021 session had one common theme: limiting the power, scope and time frame of future executive orders and actions.
This summer, the Bluegrass Institute questioned whether Gov. Andy Beshear’s executive orders were legal and called on legislators to make significant changes to law to ensure crippling orders – like shutting down businesses – would no longer be a unilateral gubernatorial decision. Those calls eventually resulted in Senate Bill 1, one of the bills which passed both chambers last week.
SB 1:
limits certain emergency executive orders and regulations to 30 days without legislative approval;
requires the governor to call the legislature into special session before extending certain executive orders;
stops the governor from issuing the same or similar executive orders based on an identical emergency circumstances;
allows the governor to suspend statutes only with approval of the attorney general and
stops the governor from making changes to how elections are held (e.g. expanding mail-in voting).
Social media posts claiming SB 1 grants new powers to the governor are wrong. All powers mentioned in SB 1 are already granted to the governor by state law. These powers were simply copied over to SB 1 in order to define the types of emergency executive orders to which the new law would apply.
The Bluegrass Institute has also been critical of the legislature’s inability to rein in certain egregious orders, including mask mandates or shutdown of down places of worship. In response, the legislature passed Senate Bill 2 which limits the time frame of certain emergency regulations, and requires a public comment period, justification of the regulation and legislative review.
The General Assembly also passed House Bill 1 through both chambers. This bill establishes guidelines for businesses and schools to reopen during the COVID-19 pandemic, establishes guidelines for visitation to long-term care facilities and waves interest and penalties on employers’ tax bills to give businesses more time to pay them. Though the bill expires at the end of 2021, it limits Beshear’s ability to unilaterally dictate the closing of schools and businesses for the duration of the current state of emergency.
Lastly, the legislature passed House Bill 5 which stops the governor from making temporary board reorganizations when the legislature isn’t in session or hasn’t voted to approve those moves. We’ve criticized Beshear’s dismantling of the Kentucky Board of Education on his first day as governor and we partnered in a lawsuit with several of the ousted board members. HB 5 should stop this or any governor from reorganizing and entire board based on solely on ideological politics because it requires legislative approval.