As the Montana Senate prepares for a Monday reboot following an opening week stalled by infighting, House lawmakers are taking first bites at meaty social issues, starting with a transgender bathroom access bill. A Senate stalemate over committee assignments, triggered in the first 15 minutes of the session’s opening day, continued to pause hearings on bills through Friday. Thirty-three hearings were on the calendar for week two, however, including priority issues like Medicaid expansion and bills to collar Montana courts.The last several legislative sessions have been marked in part by so-called “culture war” issues, including when one of the state’s first trans lawmakers was banned from the House floor in 2023 after her comments opposing a gender-affirming care ban for trans minors drew the ire of Republicans. That lawmaker is now on the House Judiciary Committee that considered the new bathroom bill Friday.House committees worked through 83 bill hearings while the Senate was idle, according to scheduling records.In the Senate, the week-long standoff over committee assignments ended in a failed Thursday-night vote to adopt Senate rules killing the committee at the heart of the matter. “We got to keep moving and get this squared away,” Sen. President Matt Regier said of the committee standoff. “But in the meantime, there’s going to be committee meetings happening and we need to get things ramped up here.”What tripped the Senate was a newly created committee to deal with matters concerning the governor’s office. All eight committee members, Republican and Democrat, balked at their assignments, arguing that the Executive Branch Review Committee to which they had been assigned had no clear mission and was doing work usually spread across other committees.Working with the Democratic minority and four sympathetic Republicans, the committee members managed to reassign themselves to different committees by changing Senate rules. The nine Republicans participating in the revolt issued a statement Friday arguing that by reassigning the committee’s Republicans, they had added GOP votes to the ledger of several key committees. “Under our proposed rules, Republicans will not only continue to control all committees but will strengthen Republican representation by adding more of our caucus members to key committees,” said Sen. Joshua Kassmier, R-Fort Benton, in the press release. Sen. Jason Ellsworth, the Hamilton Republican who led the Senate last session and failed to win that job this go-around, had said the same as Kassmier during an emotional Republican caucus this week, in which it was suggested that division over committee assignments had ceded control of the Senate to the 18 Democrats in the minority, a move that both stunned and frustrated Regier, who was in his very first week as Senate president. The Senate will move forward next week under the rules as amended on opening day by Senate Minority Leader Pat Flowers and supporters, meaning there will be new voting members on committees that Republican planners didn’t strategize for when announcing committee assignments last November. Meanwhile, House lawmakers moved ahead on the bill hearings. By Friday, the House Judiciary Committee was hearing House Bill 121, a bill to block transgender individuals from using public restrooms that align with their gender identity. The hearing drew national attention as the first state-level proposed transgender bathroom ban of 2025. The three-hour hearing Friday was packed with witnesses debating the logistics and purpose of screening people for bathroom access according to their sex assigned at birth. The bill comes after a group of GOP lawmakers also tried before the session started to block trans legislators from using certain bathrooms in the Capitol.Supporters of the bill said the measure was needed to protect cisgender women, while opponents said the bill would threaten the safety of transgender individuals who would have to endure screening before being allowed to use a public restroom.“Trans people are people and deserve safety, dignity and respect just as much as anyone else. Trans people are not trying to invade anyone’s space. They’re just trying to go to the bathroom like everyone else and then move on with their day. This is a dangerous proposed policy backed by junk science,” said Nicole Gomez with Catalyst, a nonprofit formed from Montana Women Vote and the Montana Human Rights Network.The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Kerri Seekins-Crowe, R-Billings, in closing arguments said the proposal was designed to protect women from feeling unsafe in public places. That idea was echoed by supporters from the Montana Family Foundation and the Alliance Defending Freedom, both conservative policy groups.Lobbyists for local governments and public employee unions voiced concern about the cost of enforcement and the risk of being sued for implementation of the proposed law, which may face several revisions in the months to come.Lawmakers on House Judiciary did not vote on the bill Friday.The post Montana House hears trans bathroom bill as Senate stalls out appeared first on Montana Free Press.