Supermajority runs out of time to greenlight House version of bill but does pass abortion restriction
Republicans who enjoy a supermajority in the West Virginia legislature nonetheless failed to pass a controversial bill restricting how race is taught in public schools because they missed a midnight deadline in the final moments of the 2022 session.
Lawmakers spent weeks during the legislative session debating and advancing proposed bills similar to the Anti-Racism Act of 2022. It wasn’t immediately clear why Republicans waited until late on Saturday to take a final vote. The act had passed the Senate and House overwhelmingly and the vote was merely to greenlight the House version.
“We took the vote, but essentially that didn’t matter because it didn’t make deadline,” Senate spokesperson Jacque Bland said, adding that the education bill now has no path to becoming law.
The bill said students can’t be taught moral character is determined by race, or that a person by virtue of their race “bears responsibility for actions committed by other members of the same race”.
It would have created a mechanism for reporting complaints and for the legislature to collect data on how many complaints are substantiated each year. It did not specify punishment.