Sixty Days, Midnight, and a Photograph in the Hallway
A Final-Hours Reckoning: What the GOP Supermajority Did — and Didn't Do — in the Closing 48 Hours of the 2026 Session
The West Virginia Legislature’s 60-day session ended at the stroke of midnight Saturday, March 14, closing the book on the 87th Legislature with a tax cut in one hand and a dead child-protection bill in the other. Somewhere between those two facts lies the full story of what West Virginia’s Republican supermajority chose to do with the people’s time and the people’s trust.
The WASP was watching. Here is what happened.
The Numbers, Briefly
Of the 2,777 bills introduced over nine weeks, 304 completed the full legislative process, roughly one in nine. That ratio sounds grim until you consider what some of those 304 actually were: a personal income tax cut retroactive to January 1, a pay raise for teachers and state troopers, and Baylea’s Law, a measure that turns community grief into criminal deterrence and will make drunk drivers in this state think harder before getting behind the wheel.
Then there is Raylee’s Law, which did not pass for the fourth consecutive year.
The High Water Mark: Baylea’s Law Becomes Law
Baylea Craig Bower was 25 years old when she was killed on Easter Sunday morning, April 20, 2025, heading home from her in-laws’ house to spend the holiday with her parents. A drunk and cocaine-impaired driver named Destany Lester, 19, was traveling over 90 miles per hour on State Route 121 in Raleigh County when she crossed the centerline and hit Baylea head-on.
Lester was convicted of DUI causing death. Her sentence: home confinement followed by a youthful offender program. That outcome landed in Boone and Raleigh Counties like a match in dry grass.
Del. Josh Holstein (R-Boone) knew Baylea’s family. He learned of her death that same Easter morning when his pastor, before beginning services, asked his daughter to turn off the church livestream and told the congregation what had happened. Holstein carried the story to the floor months later with quiet conviction: “I play music at my church, and I’ve watched that man, from the time he lost his daughter to now, still have faith, stronger than most people I’ve ever seen.”
Holstein’s bill, House Bill 4712, raised the sentencing floor on DUI causing death from three-to-fifteen years up to five-to-thirty years, tripled the applicable fines, and went further than prior law by prohibiting probation, suspended sentences, home confinement, or youthful offender diversion for drivers found to have acted with deliberate disregard for others’ safety. Senate Judiciary Chairman Tom Willis (R-Berkeley) called it closing “a loophole in the law.” He is correct about that, whatever else one might say about Chairman Willis, and we will get to that as well.
Notably, the bill sat in Willis’s Senate Judiciary Committee for three weeks without an agenda appearance, long enough that WV MetroNews published a commentary bluntly titled “Why Isn’t Baylea’s Law Running?” The committee finally took it up on March 11, passed it, and the full Senate followed on March 13 with a 34-0 vote. That the bill required public pressure to get a committee hearing is a pattern worth noting. It is not the only time this session that bills with broad support and clear merit sat in committee longer than they should have.
Baylea’s friends and family were present in the gallery the day it passed the House, dressed in blue. Her best friend Raegan Harper described what Baylea would have made of the scene: “She would be here. She’d be holding the biggest photo. She’d probably be chanting. She would be doing an interview. She would have posted it all on Facebook. She probably would have had triple the amount of people that are here.”
The bill cleared the House 95-0. It cleared the Senate 34-0. Not one dissenting vote in either chamber. Gov. Morrisey will sign it. He should do so promptly and with ceremony. Baylea’s family has earned that much.
The Wins That Crossed The Line
Senate Bill 392, the personal income tax cut, completed the full legislative process on the final day. The House had stripped out a vape tax the Senate originally attached as a pay-for mechanism; the Senate agreed Saturday and the clean bill passed. The cut is 5 percent, retroactive to January 1. Sen. Trenton Barnhart (R-Pleasants) called it “another step towards eventually getting to zero.” The direction is correct, and the WASP supported this outcome from the beginning of the session.
House Bill 4765, the teacher and State Police pay raise, survived a late-session fight over a locality pay amendment the Senate had inserted. The Senate ultimately backed down, and the 3 percent raise for teachers, school service personnel, and State Police troopers cleared with under ten minutes remaining. A 3 percent raise for other general revenue state employees was folded into the budget bill.
The Legislature also paused Saturday to honor WV Army National Guard Spc. Sarah Beckstrom, 20, who was shot on November 26, 2025, while on patrol in Washington, D.C. as part of Operation Safe and Beautiful and died the following day. Gov. Morrisey presented the West Virginia Distinguished Service Medal posthumously to her parents, Gary and Evalea Beckstrom, in a Capitol ceremony Saturday. Both chambers recessed so members could attend. Some moments transcend the session calendar.
The Governor Takes His Bow
Hours after the session ended, the West Virginia Prosperity Group, a political messaging organization aligned with Gov. Morrisey, sent a press release to mark the occasion. “Governor Morrisey continues to deliver on his promise to make West Virginia the shining state in the mountains,” said WVPG spokesperson Nathan Brand. “From tax cuts and education to economic competitiveness, Morrisey has secured huge wins for the Mountain State, and he’s just getting started.”
The release catalogued a full victory lap: tax cuts, pay raises, Hope Scholarship funding, the rural health program, energy planning, micro-credentialing, portable benefits for independent contractors, workforce development, and the elimination of 30 outdated boards and commissions. The governor also claimed credit for fighting to increase roads and highway funding.
The WASP reports the release as written, for the record. What the release did not mention is where the more interesting story lives.
What Died, And Who Helped Kill It
Three bills that would have materially advanced West Virginia’s economic future did not make it to the governor’s desk. Sources tell the WASP that Gov. Morrisey worked behind the scenes to kill all three. This is not a story about legislative dysfunction alone. It is, in part, a story about a governor using his political capital in the Senate to stop legislation his own Republican allies in the House had championed.
The first is TEAM West Virginia. House Bill 4001 would have created a private, independent nonprofit economic development corporation modeled directly on Ohio’s JobsOhio program, one of the most successful state economic development vehicles in the country. We wrote about it here. House Speaker Roger Hanshaw championed it from the opening days of session. The House passed it on Crossover Day. The Senate never moved it to the floor.
WV MetroNews commentator TJ Meadows wrote last week, in a piece titled “The Senate Said ‘No’ to West Virginia’s Economic Future,” that “supporters of TEAM West Virginia believe the governor quietly worked the Senate in an effort to stop the bill.” Meadows, who is not prone to overstatement, put it plainly: while the House tried to give the state much-needed medicine, the Senate added poison by refusing to run the bill. He noted that Ohio Governor Mike DeWine reportedly joked that JobsOhio has worked so well he was not sure he should encourage West Virginia lawmakers to adopt something similar. “Congratulations, Governor DeWine,” Meadows wrote. “You and Ohio win.”
Sources who spoke to the WASP confirm Meadows’s read and go further. According to those sources, Morrisey’s position was that he does not need legislation to recruit companies to West Virginia, that he can do it on his own, and that the TEAM WV structure would constrain the flexibility he prefers in dealmaking. Sources describe the governor’s posture on economic development as that of a man who wants every lever personally in his own hands and does not trust the Legislature to build infrastructure he cannot unilaterally direct. The governor’s office was not asked for comment prior to publication.
The WASP will say plainly what that posture costs West Virginia. The state is losing population every year. One data center deal does not reverse that trend. Ohio built JobsOhio into one of the premier economic development machines in the country precisely because it removed the process from the day-to-day political calculations of whoever happens to be governor. What West Virginia needs is an institution. What it got instead was a governor who preferred to keep the phone calls to himself.
The second and third bills are House Bill 4006 and House Bill 4010. HB 4006, the West Virginia Aerospace and Advanced Manufacturing Growth Act, would have created a formal state program to attract, develop, and support aerospace operations and manufacturing in West Virginia, including a grant program, economic development agreements, and a workforce training pipeline targeting one of the fastest-growing industrial sectors in the country. HB 4010 would have committed $75 million to an airport hangar grant program, targeting wide-body hangar construction at qualifying West Virginia airports to build an aviation repair, overhaul, and maintenance base in the state.
Both died. Sources tell the WASP Morrisey worked against both for the same reason he opposed TEAM WV: he preferred to control aerospace and aviation recruitment personally rather than have the Legislature build a statutory framework around it.
The West Virginia Prosperity Group’s victory press release did not mention TEAM WV, HB 4006, or HB 4010. The WASP noticed.
The locality pay fight deserves mention here. The Senate’s amendment to the teacher and State Police raise bill would have given supplemental compensation to workers in higher-cost counties, a policy with straightforward logic. Sources tell the WASP that Morrisey also worked to kill locality pay, and that the Senate ultimately receded from that amendment in part due to pressure from the governor’s office. Whether public school teachers in high-cost counties should have received that additional compensation is a question those teachers may want to keep in mind between now and the next election.
Chairman Willis’s Session: A Note On Patterns
Senate Judiciary Chairman Tom Willis (R-Berkeley) is running in the May Republican primary for U.S. Senate against incumbent Shelley Moore Capito. That political context is not incidental to what follows. It is the context.
Willis used the Judiciary chairmanship throughout the 2026 session as a legislative platform for that campaign. He shepherded bills on abortifacients, Second Amendment reaffirmation, and mandatory ICE cooperation through the Senate with evident energy and considerable floor time. His conservative credentials are not manufactured. He is a Green Beret, an attorney, and the man who unseated then-Senate President Craig Blair in the 2024 primary.
He is also, by the account of multiple Capitol sources, a difficult colleague. The polite version is that members find him hard to work with. The impolite version is how they actually say it in the hallways, and this publication aims to remain readable at breakfast.
The WASP has been told by sources that Willis killed HB 5319, a public camping regulation bill, by placing it on his committee’s agenda on the final meeting day of his committee and then pulling it from the agenda while committee members were still in the room. His stated reason was that the bill was “poorly written.” The bill’s legislative sponsor had endorsed Shelley Moore Capito in the Senate primary. Sources draw a direct line between those two facts. Willis has not addressed the allegation publicly.
Following the bill’s failure, the ACLU claimed credit for defeating HB 5319. Willis’s allies and the bill’s opponents are content to let that narrative stand. It is tidier than the alternative explanation.
The WASP is a conservative publication, and we have no particular interest in carrying water for the ACLU. We are also a publication that believes conservative legislation deserves to be killed or passed on its merits, not on the basis of which Senate primary endorsements its sponsor gave. If Willis used a Judiciary Committee chairmanship funded by West Virginia taxpayers to settle a campaign score, that is a serious allegation and it deserves to be answered seriously. His silence on the matter is noted.
On the campaign trail and in the Capitol hallways, Willis has been telling people that God told him he is going to win the Senate race. The WASP does not adjudicate theological claims about U.S. Senate contests. What the WASP can report is that Shelley Moore Capito holds $4.35 million in cash on hand against Willis’s roughly $200,000, carries the endorsement of President Trump, has the support of more than half the Republican House caucus, and out-performed Trump statewide in the 2020 election. The voters of West Virginia will weigh those factors on May 12.
Sources also tell the WASP that Willis is actively planning for the possibility that the numbers do not break his way. If the Senate primary does not go as expected, sources say Willis intends to position himself as a candidate for West Virginia Senate President in the leadership elections that follow November.
He is also said to be considering a challenge to Del. Josh Holstein (R-Boone) for the WVGOP state chairmanship, with that election coming this summer. Holstein, who currently serves as state party chairman, has expressed to many sources that he is interested in running for re-election. Our sources tell us Tony Hodge, the previously elected co-chairman of the WVGOP, is contemplating a run for re-election to that position. Both men are well-liked, impressive spokesmen, and have very strong conservative credentials in their record. They will be a formidable team for any challenger to overcome.
The Lowest Low: Raylee’s Law Dies Again, With A Photograph Standing Guard Outside The Door
Now we get to it. And the WASP wants to be clear about the frame before we begin: this is not a section written from the perspective of a liberal outlet lamenting Republican failure. This is a conservative publication asking why a Republican supermajority, in both chambers, could not find a way to protect abused children across seven consecutive sessions.
Raylee Jolynn Browning was eight years old. She died the day after Christmas, 2018, in Fayette County, of sepsis caused by bacterial pneumonia. That pneumonia was the physical end product of prolonged abuse and neglect at the hands of her father, his girlfriend, and his girlfriend’s sister. All three were convicted and sentenced to prison in subsequent years. Before she died, Raylee’s teachers had seen enough to contact Child Protective Services. Her father, upon learning of the report, withdrew Raylee from public school and into homeschooling. She disappeared from the mandatory reporter system. She was dead within weeks.
Raylee’s Law is targeted and deliberately narrow. The Senate version that crossed over to the House Saturday required teachers who file abuse or neglect reports to notify their county superintendent within 24 hours. The superintendent would then be required to inquire with CPS about the investigation’s status, also within 24 hours. CPS would have 48 hours to confirm the investigation to the superintendent, and a full 10 days to substantiate the claim. Only if CPS failed to substantiate the claim within that window, or determined the report was unfounded, would the county school board be required to approve a homeschooling request. The entire mechanism is designed to prevent one specific thing: a parent under active investigation for child abuse using the homeschooling transfer process to move a child out of reach of the adults most likely to notice something is wrong.
This bill has been before the Legislature since at least 2020. The House passed versions of it in both 2024 and 2025. In 2024, a Boone County girl named Kyneddi Miller died of starvation while being homeschooled. In 2025, an 11-year-old Taylor County girl named Miana Moran died weighing 43 pounds. The bill still did not become law. West Virginia has a Republican supermajority. The WASP supported that supermajority’s election. The WASP would like to know what it is being used for.
The sequence this year was as dramatic as anything the 87th Legislature produced. On Friday night, Day 59, with fewer than 24 hours remaining, a bipartisan coalition of roughly 15 senators led by Sen. Ryan Weld (R-Brooke) amended Raylee’s Law into House Bill 5537, a minor cleanup bill repealing obsolete sections of the Education code.
What happened next is worth pausing on. Senate President and Lt. Gov. Randy Smith (R-Preston) ruled the amendment non-germane, which under normal circumstances would have ended the conversation entirely. Sen. Weld challenged the ruling directly. Eighteen senators then voted to override their own Senate President, a parliamentary maneuver so rare in the West Virginia Legislature that most members who have served multiple terms have never seen it executed successfully. The presiding officer of the Senate was overruled by the body he presides over, on a bill about protecting children from abuse, with less than 24 hours left in the session. That is not a procedural footnote. That is the West Virginia Senate doing something genuinely difficult and institutionally significant because its members believed the stakes required it. Smith himself, notably, voted in favor of the measure after his ruling was overturned. The amended bill passed 24-7.
Weld, a former prosecutor with hands-on experience in child abuse and neglect cases, chose his words carefully: “This is a balancing act. It’s not about the family who loves their kid. It’s about the kid who can’t speak up on their own.”
Senate Education Chairwoman Amy Grady (R-Mason), a fourth-grade teacher and one of the bill’s principal Senate architects, was equally plain: “Homeschool families are not the problem, and this is not about punishing or targeting them. Sadly, there have been situations where the homeschooling system has been used to hide abuse. That is why this is needed.”
The Senate had done its job, and done it the hard way. What happened next, on the House side, is a story that multiple named sources have now told the WASP directly, on the record, and their accounts align.
The House received the Senate’s message on HB 5537 on Saturday morning. According to Del. Shawn Fluharty (D-Ohio County), who has championed this legislation for years and is speaking on the record, the bill was in the House’s possession by 10 a.m. Saturday. The chamber had until midnight. What followed, Fluharty said, was a day of breaks and farewell speeches while the bill sat untouched. “Instead of running the legislation, we spent all day taking breaks and giving farewell speeches applauding ourselves instead of actually working,” Fluharty said. “Then during the final hour, Roger Hanshaw finally decided to receive the Senate message after sitting on it for over 12 hours. By that time the fix was in and we all knew the bill had no chance.”
That is a direct, named, on-the-record accusation that Speaker Hanshaw personally held the Senate message for more than 12 hours before formally receiving it. Hanshaw’s office has not responded to the allegation.
At 10:30 p.m., Del. David “Elliot” Pritt (R-Fayette) had tried to force an immediate vote. His motion failed 47-49. Sens. Grady and Weld physically walked onto the House floor during a recess to ask deputy speakers Matthew Rohrbach and Joe Ellington to please put the bill on the floor. That two sitting senators had to cross the building and personally lobby House leadership to schedule a vote on a bill the chamber had held since morning tells you everything you need to know about the priorities operating in that room.
What followed in the remaining 45 minutes was eye-popping. According to Del. Pritt, who spoke to the WASP directly and on the record, it was an organized effort by two opposing factions. Pritt said roughly ten members walked into the chamber that night with a coordinated plan, prepared motions, and a deliberate strategy to use House rules to guide the process toward passage. Arrayed against them was a faction with its own plan, and that faction’s plan was to run out the clock.
“I tried so hard,” Pritt told the WASP. “I used every procedure and rule available to me in an attempt to move this bill. Many of us did. Many of the motions I made were made in an attempt to restrict the plans those who opposed the bill had to filibuster or run out the clock.”
Pritt rejected directly the framing some members offered afterward, that his procedural motions were silencing debate or rushing the process. “The arguments that the motions I was making were ‘silencing debate’ or circumventing the process are disingenuous at best,” he said. “The argument that this was ‘rushed at the last minute’ is entirely disingenuous. We have debated and amended this bill for the entire four years I have been in the Legislature. Everyone in that room knows what this bill is, and to play dumb on camera for the whole world to see is something they will have to live with, not me.”
Del. Adam Burkhammer (R-Lewis) offered the opposition’s most presentable argument on the floor: “I don’t care what time it is. Our job is to write good law.” The WASP’s response to Del. Burkhammer is this: the Legislature had 60 days and this bill had been before the body since at least 2020. If draftsmanship was the problem all along, six sessions is more than enough time to produce the good law nobody produced. The amendments at 11:40 p.m. were not a good-faith effort to improve legislation. They were, as Pritt stated plainly, purposeful and planned filibustering. Burkhammer did not respond to our requests for comment.
What broke Pritt, and what he wanted the WASP to report, was not the procedural defeat. It was what came after. “It was the clapping, the high-fiving, and the laughing that really got to me,” he said. “I am sitting at my desk literally in tears because I understand what the ramifications of another year of inaction could be for kids in our state while I’m simultaneously watching some people I serve with celebrate the stonewalling of and the purposeful killing of a common sense and just piece of legislation that has been vetted, debated, compromised, and agreed upon for three years. I can’t stomach that.”
At 11:57 p.m., with the Senate already adjourned sine die, the House passed an amended version of the bill 94-1. It meant nothing. The Senate was gone. The clock had run out precisely as designed.
The Crouse Defense, The Grady Rebuttal, And The Shamblin Counter
In the hours after session ended, Delegate Kathie Hess Crouse (R-Putnam) posted a detailed account of the night’s events on Facebook, offering an explanation of the House’s conduct that deserves examination on the merits.
Crouse wrote that the House did not receive the Senate’s message on HB 5537 until approximately 9:30 p.m. Saturday night, well after the chamber had been in session all day. If accurate, that would meaningfully change the picture. A bill arriving at 9:30 p.m. with other Senate messages ahead of it in the queue is a different situation than a bill that sat available all day while members worked other business.
The documented record does not support a 9:30 p.m. arrival. Capitol reporters tracking the bill’s movement placed the Senate message in the House’s possession on Saturday morning. Fluharty, speaking on the record, puts the bill in the House’s hands by 10 a.m. But the most direct rebuttal of Crouse’s account came not from a Democrat or a reporter but from Sen. Grady herself, a Republican, responding to Crouse’s Facebook post directly and by name.
“The Senate sent the bill to the House on Friday night, but you guys had already adjourned for the night,” Grady wrote. “However, it was in possession of the House ALL DAY Saturday, from at least 10:00 a.m. It did not arrive at 9:30 p.m. House leadership just chose to ignore it and let it sit there all day. Senator Weld and I walked over around 10:30 p.m. and made a deal with them so it could at least have a chance.”
That last detail matters. The bill’s appearance on the House floor at 11:12 p.m. was not a spontaneous decision by House leadership. It was the product of a negotiated arrangement that two senators had to physically broker after walking across the building. The House did not choose to take up the bill. The House was persuaded to give it a floor appearance after more than twelve hours of inaction, with less than an hour remaining.
Grady also disclosed something that reframes Crouse’s position considerably. “I thought we had something we agreed on in the bill I had in the Senate since you provided input that I included and you told me you were okay with it,” Grady wrote to Crouse. “However, things and agreements seem to change when a little pressure is put on people.” That is a Republican senator telling a Republican delegate, in public, that she had incorporated that delegate’s own suggested language into the bill and received her approval, only to watch that agreement dissolve when political pressure arrived.
Grady’s closing assessment of the session, offered directly on the record, was unsparing: “The number of political ploys and games that are played with this bill, and others, every year is exhausting and shameful. I have never been more disappointed and disgusted in the dishonest actions I saw of many of my colleagues, in the Senate and House, as I was this legislative session.”
Crouse’s substantive defense is also worth engaging directly. She argues, and Del. Burkhammer argued on the floor, that the Senate’s version of Raylee’s Law missed the point because the real failure in Raylee’s case was Nicholas County CPS ignoring years of abuse reports before her death. That critique is not without merit. CPS did fail Raylee Browning, catastrophically and repeatedly. Holding CPS accountable for those failures is a legitimate and worthy legislative goal.
It is also a goal that has been available to pursue for years. No standalone CPS accountability bill advanced out of the House during the 87th Legislature. No member fast-tracked a CPS reform measure at any point before 11:40 p.m. on the final night of the session. The argument that Raylee’s Law should be rejected in favor of better legislation carries considerably more weight when that better legislation exists and is ready to move. At midnight on March 14, it did not.
Crouse’s account drew a quiet but pointed response from within the Republican caucus itself. Delegate Andy Shamblin (R-Kanawha) broke from his usual practice of avoiding political commentary on social media and posted a statement saying he had never felt more disappointed in the legislative process. Shamblin, a Republican writing about a Republican-controlled chamber, was unsparing about what he observed. “Some lawmakers filibustered, attempted amendments, and did all they could to run out the clock,” he wrote, “and it worked.”
Shamblin was also direct about the bill’s purpose and the bad-faith framing used against it. “This is not an attack on homeschooling,” he wrote. “West Virginia has thousands of responsible homeschooling families who do a tremendous job educating and raising their children. Nothing in this bill changes their rights or freedoms. What this legislation does is address a very narrow situation: when there is already an active CPS investigation into abuse or neglect. In those cases, it simply pauses the ability to withdraw a child from school until the investigation is resolved. That seems like basic common sense.”
Shamblin credited Fluharty for his years of advocacy on the legislation and offered pointed recognition to the bill’s Senate champions. “Major shoutout to Senators Amy Grady and Ryan Weld who faced enormous difficulty getting this passed the Senate but persevered,” he wrote.
A Republican delegate explicitly calling out his own Republican colleagues for running the clock on a child-protection bill is not a routine event in the West Virginia House. That Shamblin felt compelled to break his own practice and say it publicly is itself a point worth noting.
The Floor, And The Fallout
Fluharty, who placed a poster-sized photograph of Raylee Browning in the hallway outside the chamber doors because House rules bar props inside, addressed the members who had spent the day not moving the bill as the clock expired. “This is abhorrent behavior. Disgusting government. When you’re done here tonight, after you kill this bill again, go out there and at least have the guts to look at her. Have the guts. I don’t think you do.”
In a statement provided to the WASP on the record, Fluharty was more expansive about where responsibility lies. “Disgraceful cowardice has been shown from Republican leadership for years on Raylee’s Law, but nothing tops the abhorrent behavior seen on the last day of session,” Fluharty said. “The House had possession of it at 10 a.m. on Saturday. Instead of running the legislation, we spent all day taking breaks and giving farewell speeches applauding ourselves instead of actually working. The fringe lunatics concocted amendments to slow down the bill because they would rather fight for child abusers’ rights than children’s rights. Every West Virginian should be disgusted. They deserve to know the type of people serving in their legislature.”
Grady said afterward: “I can’t believe we have so many members of the Legislature who stand up and defend child abusers. It’s disheartening, disturbing, and heartbreaking.”
Weld was precise: “They had the bill for eight, nine, ten hours. They got it before 11 o’clock this morning and did nothing. With some of the things that I saw and heard in that debate, I’ve never seen a fight to protect child abusers.” He added a promise: “After what I saw in here yesterday and over there today, I’m 100 percent locked in. This is coming back next year, so they better be ready for it.”
Pritt, speaking to the WASP after adjournment, said he carries the defeat personally even as he acknowledged the fault lies with those who planned against the bill. “I am just so disappointed with myself for being unable to successfully get it done,” he said, “and I am disappointed in many of the people I serve with for their purposeful and planned filibustering. I am even more disappointed with the actions of many of them at the end of the night.” His commitment going forward was unambiguous: “Whether I am re-elected or not, someone down there will know it is the right and just thing to do, and they will continue to push for it to make it across the finish line.”
The fallout was not limited to supporters of the bill. West Virginia Democratic Party Chairman Mike Pushkin, speaking on the record, called the final hour of Day 60 in the House “absolutely disgusting” and said it epitomized everything people hate about politics. Beyond Raylee’s Law itself, Pushkin catalogued what else died in the chaos of that final hour. Legislation to provide tax relief to metallurgical coal producers facing mine closures and job losses went unaddressed. A bill to increase the homestead tax exemption and provide relief to homeowners never came to a vote. Increased funding for special needs students, in a state where county school systems have been making difficult decisions about whether to keep schools open, also ran out of time. “Their priorities are horribly haywire,” Pushkin said.
The WASP notes that Pushkin is the Democratic Party chairman and his characterizations of Republican legislators reflect that perspective. The bills he named as casualties are real, and their failure is documented. Whether the cause was the same faction that killed Raylee’s Law or simply the general disorder of a final hour that had been mismanaged from the morning, the result is the same. Legislation that West Virginia needed died on the floor of Roger Hanshaw’s House.
The Bottom Line
The WASP is a conservative publication, but we will remain a fair publication. We believe the GOP supermajority should be held accountable when it fails, and that the strongest conservatism is one that demands results, not just party affiliation.
The income tax is lower. Teachers and troopers got a raise. Baylea Bower’s death will be the last time in West Virginia a drunk driver gets home confinement for killing someone on Easter morning. Those things matter, and the WASP says so without reservation.
But the full picture of this session includes a governor whose political operation issued a glossy press release about wins while sources describe him working behind the scenes to kill three economic development bills that Republican legislators had championed. It includes a Senate Judiciary chairman using his committee’s calendar as a campaign instrument against a colleague’s bill because he endorsed the wrong person in a Senate primary. And it includes a House of Delegates, under Speaker Roger Hanshaw’s watch, that received a child-protection bill on Saturday morning, held it for twelve or more hours, required two senators to physically cross the building and broker a deal to get it on the floor at all, and then presided over a final-hour process in which a coordinated faction ran out the clock while colleagues sat at their desks in tears and others celebrated.
The West Virginia Prosperity Group says Gov. Morrisey is “just getting started.” The WASP notes that TEAM West Virginia, HB 4006, HB 4010, and locality pay are not in that press release. The governor’s political operation is telling a story about the session, and it is a story with significant pages missing.
The Legislature had an unambiguous opportunity, on the final day of the session, to close a loophole connected to the deaths of multiple West Virginia children across multiple years. That opportunity was managed into the ground by a minority of House members who walked in with a plan to kill the bill, executed that plan, and celebrated when it worked. In Roger Hanshaw’s chamber. On his watch. With his schedule.
The Senate did its job on that particular bill, and did it the hard way, overriding its own presiding officer to get the bill across the building. A bipartisan coalition of senators showed more institutional courage on Day 59 than the House showed across all of Day 60. Republican delegates like Andy Shamblin and Elliott Pritt stood up and said what needed to be said, in public, at political cost to themselves. A Republican senator called out her Republican colleagues by name, in public, on the record, and said she had never been more disgusted by dishonest behavior in her time in the Legislature. The bill died anyway.
The WASP will have more to say about this in the weeks and months to come. Our sources, whom we protect fiercely, tell us that House leadership has never emerged from a legislative session on more uncertain footing. The 2026 session planted something. Whether the people with the authority to act on it have the appetite to do so is the question West Virginia Republicans should be asking themselves right now. 🐝
The West Virginia WASP is a West Virginia political news, humor, and commentary outlet. Follow us at wvwasp.com and @wvwasp on X. A portion of the legislative floor quotes are sourced from contemporaneous media coverage of floor proceedings. The Morrisey and Willis sections reflect reporting from Capitol sources; the governor’s office was not asked for comment prior to publication; Sen. Willis was asked for comment but we received no response. 🐝
Does the WASP have any concrete indication why those legislators who killed Raylee's Law did so? Speculation?