If lawmaking were graded on quantity not quality, Connecticut would be on the honor roll. In 2025 the General Assembly introduced 4,064 bills — eighth most in the nation for a state with barely 3.6 million people.
But almost all of that effort went nowhere. Only 232 of those bills — roughly 5.7 percent — actually became law, well below the national average passage rate of 28 percent. Connecticut isn’t just below average; it’s scraping the bottom of the barrel.
According to a recent report by FiscalNote — a policy insights company — Connecticut’s performance is hardly the pinnacle of an effective legislature.
The numbers are even more depressing when set against other states. New York lawmakers buried their capitol in paperwork, introducing more than 18,800 bills and still managing to pass 12 percent of them. Colorado, by contrast, led the nation with a 74 percent passage rate, filing 730 bills and enacting 539.
At the other extreme is Massachusetts, which has introduced 8,456 bills but enacted only seven. Its session runs until January 6, 2026, longer than most states, but even with the extra time its record so far puts it at the bottom.
Low passage rates are often blamed on divided government, but data tells a different story. States with Republican single-party control averaged a 36.4 percent passage rate, Democratic-controlled states averaged 19.8 percent, and split governments came in at 18.6 percent.
Connecticut has a Democratic supermajority, making most bills virtually veto proof. Yet its 5.7 passage rate isn’t just below its peers; it’s miles behind them. When a party controls the levers of government and still can’t advance most of its agenda, the problem isn’t gridlock — it’s a legislative culture that rewards virtue signaling over substance.
The sheer volume alone should raise eyebrows. Ranking eighth in total bills introduced reflects a churn and burn process where lawmakers drop concept or “dummy” bills — half-formed ideas of intent filed without full statutory language — and then leave committees to fill in the blanks often well after the public had a chance to weigh in. That may pad the numbers, but it isn’t good governance.
The result is a clogged process that wastes floor time and invites last-minute omnibus surprises. Residents don’t need four thousand bills — they need a few hundred good ones that are read, vetted, and written into law. And while lawmakers flood the system with paperwork, genuine priorities like public safety, cost of living, and energy reliability get lost in the shuffle.
Still, a low passage rate isn’t automatically a governance fail. This year, it spared taxpayers and employers a litany of mandates and tax hikes that would have increased costs, grown government, and eroded local zoning control.
A bill to let striking workers collect unemployment after just two weeks was killed by the governor’s veto, sparing the employer-financed trust fund. A sweeping zoning mandate that would have forced towns into “fair share” housing quotas met the same fate, saving municipalities from years of costly litigation. A proposed capital-gains surcharge also died on the vine, along with other activist favorites like a green amendment and ranked-choice voting.
But the process still comes at a cost.
Every doomed bill consumes scarce staff time, legal drafting, fiscal analysis, and committee bandwidth. It forces business groups, towns, schools, and citizen advocates to file testimony and follow proposals that were never destined to become law.
This overhead is a hidden tax on civic participation and a barrier for anyone without the means to hire lobbyists and lawyers to track the noise. Ordinary citizens and small businesses can’t afford that kind of access.
Lawmakers aren’t judged by the pile of bills they introduce but by the handful that actually improve life for their constituents. Connecticut would be better served if fewer bills were filed in the first place.
Effective states understand that. Colorado’s high passage rate isn’t the result of a rubber-stamp legislature; it comes from discipline. Many of its bills are straightforward clean-ups, statutory revisions, or technical updates — the kind of unglamorous work that moves quickly. The bigger ideological fights are narrowed to a manageable scale.
Colorado manages this despite having the same political makeup as Connecticut — a Democratic controlled legislature and governor. The difference is focus. Connecticut has the same advantage but rarely shows the will to use it.
The discipline to set an agenda, eliminate duplicates, and concentrate effort on what can pass is precisely what Connecticut lacks. Instead, lawmakers introduce early and often, let most of it die, and then declare victory on a handful of news headlines.
If Connecticut wants to act like a serious state, the reforms are obvious: cap bill introductions per member (with committee exceptions), consolidate duplicate proposals before the committee deadline, enforce germaneness and single-subject rules to stop last-minute amendments, require fiscal or ratepayer notes earlier so bad ideas die before they waste time. These aren’t partisan ideas. They’re basic steps toward responsible lawmaking.
The bottom line is that Connecticut’s legislature is busy — eighth busiest in the country by introductions — but not effective by any measure. A 5.7 percent enactment rate in a one-party state is not legislative prudence; it’s a symptom of an unserious process where legislators are more interested in pandering to special interests than governing. The state doesn’t need more bills. It needs laws that work — not a stack of half-baked proposals that should have stayed on the back of a cocktail napkin.
