Trump-backed push to make Nebraska winner-take-all 'impossible' this year

Sen. John Arch of La Vista, the body's speaker, announced Friday that the "time for adding bills to bills is over," warning lawmakers that the Legislature's bill revisers will have little to no time to make substantial amendments to bills as the clock on this year's legislative session winds down. Friday marked Day 56 of the 60-day session.

Arch said he had instructed the Legislature's clerk not to accept floor amendments that add bills onto other bills to avoid drafting mistakes that cost bill revisers time — limiting among the last procedural moves available to backers of the winner-take-all proposal.

Sen. Loren Lippincott of Central City, who championed the winner-take-all legislation and had remained hopeful it would become law this year as recently as Thursday afternoon, acknowledged Friday that "it's just procedurally impossible" for that to happen.

"I'm in love with my bill, so it's like laying it to rest," Lippincott told the Journal Star. "But there could be resurrection day next year."

Nebraska's single-house Legislature generally considers "priority" bills ahead of others in debate. Lippincott did not use his personal priority designation on winner-take-all this year, leaving it stalled in its committee without a vehicle to become law.

Still, Friday's announcement marked the final blow to the legislation that had been on life support since Wednesday night — and had been unlikely to become law all along, even after Trump and Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen on Tuesday implored Republican lawmakers in the state's formally nonpartisan Legislature to pass the legislation.

Trump's and Pillen's calls to action came hours after Charlie Kirk, an Arizona-based right-wing activist and radio show host who founded Turning Point USA, made a social media post highlighting a potential scenario in which Nebraska's decades-old election system could cost Trump the presidency in November.

Under the quirky system, which is also used in Maine, two of Nebraska's five electoral votes are awarded to the presidential ticket that wins the most votes statewide while the other three go to the winner of each of the state’s three congressional districts.

Lawmakers established the system in 1991 and have tried to undo it repeatedly in the decades since then, twice sending repeal bills to former Gov. Ben Nelson's desk in the 1990s, but the Democrat vetoed the legislation both times. The system survived a close call in 2016, when a proposal to return the state to a winner-take-all system fell one vote short of overcoming a filibuster.

President Joe Biden and former President Barack Obama each picked up a single electoral vote in the state in 2020 and 2008, respectively, winning the majority of votes in Nebraska's 2nd Congressional District, home to Omaha.

Kirk's post garnered millions of views and turned a national spotlight on Nebraska's Legislature. He read the office phone numbers of some state lawmakers on his radio show this week, urging listeners to call or email senators to urge their support of the winner-take-all model, kicking off a pressure campaign driven by out-of-state residents.

Some senators reported receiving hundreds of emails on the matter this week. Sen. Tom Brewer of Gordon, a conservative, said Thursday calls to the Capitol had "tied up everybody's phone lines for two days now, having everybody in the country call us."

Sen. Julie Slama of Dunbar tried to add the legislation — initially introduced in January 2023 as a standalone bill (LB764) that has been stalled in its committee for more than a year — as an amendment to an unrelated bill Wednesday evening.

A series of legislative motions set up a fateful vote on a procedural motion that could have cleared the way for the adoption of Slama's winner-take-all amendment.

But in a dramatic vote Wednesday night, lawmakers overwhelmingly rejected Slama's procedural motion that she had cast as "the last chance to pass winner-take-all this session."

Slama, who has for years championed conservative election policies, needed 23 votes on her motion. In the end, only eight conservatives joined Slama in casting a "yes" vote on her motion, which failed on a 9-36 vote in the Republican-dominated Legislature.

Even if lawmakers had supported Slama's motion, it's unlikely the Legislature would have ever taken a vote on her amendment to adopt the winner-take-all legislation to the unrelated bill (LB1300) that she sought to add it to.

Instead, Democrats in the Legislature would have filibustered Slama's amendment — a move that she would have needed 33 votes to overcome — likely killing both her amendment and the underlying bill, a so-called Christmas-tree package of legislation prioritized by Sen. Eliot Bostar of Lincoln, a Democrat.

Lippincott had repeatedly said this week that the legislation simply did not have the support of enough lawmakers to overcome a filibuster, though he declined to say where exactly his internal vote-count stood, merely saying he was "short" of 33 votes.

The 49-member Legislature is made up of 33 Republicans, 15 registered Democrats and one nonpartisan progressive — but Sen. Mike McDonnell of Omaha, who switched his party registration from Democrat to Republican this week, remained opposed to the winner-take-all model even after changing parties.

Undeterred by the political realities of the body, Kirk on Friday urged Pillen to call a special session to take up winner-take-all legislation — a move that would solve the time constraints obstructing the legislation's passage but is unlikely to change the vote count.

A spokeswoman for Pillen declined to say Friday whether he intends to call a special session. In 2022, then-Gov. Pete Ricketts declined to call a special session after Roe v. Wade was overturned, citing inadequate support among lawmakers for a special session aimed at further restricting abortion.

Still, Kirk — who has said that if Nebraska fails to act it is because Republican lawmakers lack "enough will to win" — plans to hold a Tuesday rally at an Omaha church to whip up support for the legislation.

Fifty miles away in Lincoln, though, even lawmakers who support winner-take-all have shown signs of fatigue with the out-of-state pressure to pass the bill.

"Everybody is angry all over the country at Nebraska," said Brewer, the chairman of the Government, Military and Veterans Affairs Committee, where Lippincott's bill remains stalled.

"They don't understand our system, they don't understand our process and they don't understand that this was such a poorly planned and orchestrated bill that — it is where it is because no one took care of the bill and did the things that needed to be done to have it prepped," he continued. "Only because of Charlie Kirk's comments did it get any momentum."