Proposed amendment would limit special session length

A proposed new amendment to the Idaho Constitution would ask Idaho voters to decide in November whether to limit the length of any special session of the Idaho Legislature to 20 days.

The Idaho Legislature’s Senate State Affairs Committee voted Friday to send Senate Joint Resolution 104 to the floor of the Idaho Senate with a recommendation it passes.

In 2022, voters approved an amendment to the Idaho Constitution that allows the Idaho Legislature to call itself back into session upon a written request of 60% of the members of the Idaho House of Representatives and Idaho Senate. Previously, only Idaho’s governor had the power to call a special session of the Idaho Legislature.

During Friday’s Senate State Affairs meeting at the Idaho State Capitol in Boise, Sen. Mark Harris, R-Soda Springs, said the amendment voters approved in 2022 should have included language limiting a special session called by the Idaho Legislature to 20 days, but it was overlooked by legislative drafters at the time.

“It’s not really a correction, it’s an omission we discovered,” Harris said during Friday’s meeting.

“This was not the intent of the Legislature; we don’t want to be a full time Legislature,” he added.

Citing the original version of the Idaho Constitution, Harris said it has always been the state’s intention to have a citizen-led, part-time Legislature. The Idaho Constitution limits the length of any special session called by Idaho’s governor to 20 days. Harris said the new proposed amendment, SJR 104, would make it so that special sessions called by the Idaho Legislature would have the same 20-day limit as special sessions called by the governor.

In a public hearing Friday, Trent Clark, former chairman of the Idaho Republican Party, spoke in favor of the amendment. He told members of the committee that passing the new amendment with the 20-day limit would make it so the two sections of the Idaho Constitution conform and the terminology used is not disjointed.

Originally, Harris said there was a limit of 60 days for the length of a regular session of the Idaho Legislature, but the Idaho Constitution was amended in the 1950s to repeal the limit. Today, there is no limit to the length of a regular session of the Idaho Legislature.

SJR 104 heads next to the Idaho Senate for consideration.

If two-thirds of the members of both the Idaho Senate and Idaho House vote to approve the proposed amendment, it will be put on November’s election for voters to decide. It would take a simple majority of Idaho voters to approve the amendment if it makes it to the November ballot.