"My experience with government is that when things are non-controversial and beautifully coordinated, there's not much going on." -JFK

I guess things are a lot more complicated in government than I thought. I've been in contact with Rep. Pedersen (the House Member who is really pushing for this bill) and he clarified where things will go from here with the bill. So here it is:

The next stop for the bill is probably the House General Government Appropriations Committee. (This is because the Administrative Office for the Courts has a one-time $80,000 cost to update the Judicial Information System to reflect the changes made to the parentage statute). That will likely happen next week. I sit on that committee and have already spoken with the chair, so that should be pretty straightforward. After that, the bill will go to the House Rules Committee and wait there until we are ready to consider it on the House floor. That would be the last week of February or the first week of March. Once it passes out of the House, the bill will go to the Senate Government Operations & Elections Committee (not Senate Judiciary). The bill passed out of that committee last year as well, made it out of Senate Rules, and then died on the floor of the Senate. I’m hoping we have all of that worked out.

So I guess last year it died on the floor of the Senate, not in committee. I'm going to do whatever it takes to stop that from happening again! Our surrogate is an amazing, wonderful woman, but all of this travel back and forth to Portland for her and for us is tiring and complicated. I'll keep you all postede on how things are going with the bill and what you can do, Washingtonians, to help encourage your representatives to vote for it.