State House completes bill filing; most bills ever?

House completes bill filing process for 2019 session

OKLAHOMA CITY – The Oklahoma House of Representatives finished filing bills Thursday for the first session of the 57th Legislature. A total of 1,733 House Bills and 21 House Joint Resolutions were filed.

The full text of the bills, along with additional information including authors and coauthors, can be found online at www.okhouse.gov.

Last year, the Clerk of the House reported 1,193 House bills and 32 House Joint Resolutions were filed for the 2018 session.

There are currently 24 Democrats and 77 Republicans in the House. The first session of the 57th Legislature will begin Monday, Feb. 4 at noon with the state of the state address from Gov. Kevin Stitt in the House Chamber.

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Blogger's note: according to a January 20, 2017 press release from House media, 1,340 bills and 24 joint resolutions were filed by 2017's regular session bill-filing deadline, and 921 bills and 31 joint resolutions were filed by 2016's deadline. That makes the 2019 bill-filing total by far the largest in the past four years, and an increase of 43.2% over last year's total.

UPDATE: it's the most bills filed by the House since at least 1992, pre-dating Republican control of the House. Judging by the rate at which legislation was being introduced going back further in years, this may well be a House record for bills filed.

UPDATE 2: using the search feature at OKLegislature.gov, I went back through House bill-filings dating back to the 1993 regular session - the farthest back that is online. No other year comes close to the 2019 House bill-filing total. There are a handful of years with a little over 1,300 bills, but none are higher than 1,400 except for this year. The 2019 House bill-filing is far and away the most filed, very likely to be a House record.