Dear Editor,
To the constituents of House District 54.
State legislators have received their committee and seat assignments for the 2025 session. You probably know that most work done by a legislator is in their committees. Committees are the focus of their weeks during the session. Some committees meet every day, some meet three days a week and some two. Committees are topical, which means that the committee reviews bills that are related in topic. As you would expect, the Agriculture Committee reviews Ag bills, the Tax Committee reviews tax-related bills.
Legislators can request to be placed on certain committees, but it is up to leadership in each house to make those decisions. Committee assignments are important because legislators will be far more familiar with the bills that they see debated in their committees than they will topics that they do not. For fear of boring you, I will stop there, although I have left out much information that the voter should know. Maybe I will bore you in a later article with that information.
Seat assignments on the House floor can also be very important, believe it or not. In the last session, my first, I was blessed to have been seated between Majority Leader Sue Vinton and Representative Neil Durum. I now consider both outstanding people to be personal friends. I could rely on them for advice on issues that I wasn’t familiar with. Representative Durum is a retired Highway Patrolman and so I could rely on him for advice on bills related to law enforcement and a host of other issues with which I was less familiar. Majority Leader Vinton’s experience and wisdom was very valuable to a freshman legislator. I greatly appreciate them.
I have been named Vice Chair of the Judiciary Committee, and have been placed on the Education, FWP, and Legislative Administration Committees.
These are the committee assignments that I requested except for Legislative Administration. Legislative Administration is an on-call committee which means that it meets only when a bill comes along that Legislative Administration can address.
I have also been asked to coordinate the invocations at the start of each day’s floor sessions.
As a reminder, you can watch any legislative committee or floor session online. You can also testify in committee hearings during public comment in person or online. If you get to Helena, you can watch floor sessions of the House and Senate in person.
I look forward to serving you in the 2025 session!
Representative Lee Deming HD 54
