How Kansas GOP used infamous ‘gut and go’ to avoid public input on bathroom bill

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When Kansas Senate Bill 244 came to the floor in February 2025, it was a noncontroversial bill about bail bonds.

This week, it morphed into an altogether different piece of legislation policing the use of restrooms in schools and government buildings, and mandating that transgender Kansans’ driver’s licenses reflect their sex assigned at birth.

Kansas Republicans in the House and Senate passed the substitute bill on Wednesday through a series of maneuvers that cut their constituents out of the legislative process.

There was no public hearing on the bill’s key provisions restricting restroom usage. There was no opportunity to submit written testimony for lawmakers to review before voting.

How does that happen?

In Topeka speak, the maneuver is known as a “gut and go” — stripping a bill of its contents and replacing it with entirely new language, oftentimes on a different subject.

Kasnsas lawmakers have been using it for years to circumvent public attention and fast-track controversial bills. The Star highlighted the tactic in its 2017 investigative series “Why So Secret, Kansas?” which was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist for public service reporting.

During Wednesday’s nearly six-hour floor debate in the House, Rep. Dan Osman, an Overland Park Democrat, made a motion to remove the anti-trans language from the Senate bill and place it back in the House bill where it originated. That would have paved the way for a public hearing in the Senate, but Republicans rejected the motion.

“No matter what you think about whether we should keep transgender people out of bathrooms — as abhorrent as I think that is — you certainly ought to defend the rights of your constituents to be heard,” said Rep. John Carmichael, a Wichita Democrat.

The bathroom bill will now be sent to Gov. Laura Kelly, a Democrat who has consistently vetoed anti-LGBTQ legislation. Vetoes can be overridden with the support of two-thirds supermajorities of lawmakers in the House and Senate.

The only Republican in either chamber to vote against the bill on Wednesday was Rep. Mark Schreiber of Emporia.

Many states across the country have rules prohibiting lawmakers from obscuring their intent by shuttling legislation through unrelated shell bills.

The gut and go maneuver — also known as hog-housing and radiator capping in other states — is expressly banned in the Missouri Constitution, for instance.

Bills attempting to curb its use in Kansas have never found success.

In 2017 alone, nearly a quarter of the laws passed by the Kansas Legislature started out as bills on entirely different subjects. The practice remains a staple for lawmakers, who sometimes use it to tie up loose ends in the waning days of hectic legislative sessions.

Other times, the intent is to get a bill passed as quickly as possible without drawing unwanted public scrutiny. Democratic lawmakers and LGBTQ rights groups accused Republicans of doing just that with the bathroom bill.

“Everything was done according to the rules. We didn’t do anything that was outside of what was possible,” said Rep. Susan Humphries, a Wichita Republican who carried the bill on the House floor.

“All the rules and procedures were followed. They might be distasteful to some, but they were followed,” she added.

The bill passed on Wednesday would bar people from using restrooms in government buildings that don’t align with their sex assigned at birth. It would also ban unisex multi-occupancy private spaces in buildings owned by the state of Kansas, local governments, and school districts, as well as public colleges and universities.

The restroom restrictions were abruptly added to a bill that had been solely focused on prohibiting the Department of Revenue from accommodating gender marker change requests on state identification documents.

A public hearing on the original version of the driver’s license bill was held on Jan. 13 with less than 24 hours of notice. Despite the lack of time to prepare, more than 200 people submitted written testimony opposing the bill.

The bathroom amendment was introduced in the judiciary committee on Monday by Rep. Bob Lewis, a Garden City Republican.

The amendment was added over the vehement objections of the committee’s Democratic members, who argued that no such major addition to the bill should be made without an opportunity for more public feedback.

Instead, Humphries, who chairs the committee, placed the drastically altered House bill in the shell Senate bill. Because that bill already passed the full Senate last year — when it was still about bail bonds — the Senate could concur with the changes without soliciting public feedback.

Two days later, House Republicans suspended the rules to take emergency final action on the bathroom bill Wednesday rather than following the customary practice of waiting a full day after giving their initial approval.

The Senate took less than an hour to concur with the changes, putting the finishing touches on a string of intricate maneuvers to pass the bathroom bill without hearing from Kansas residents who would be affected or from local governments and school boards that would be required to comply with the restrictions or face significant fines.

Will Rapp, managing director for the Kansas chapter of the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network, described the legislative maneuvering as “complete cowardice.”

“When a legislature has a super majority and could pass anything they wish, yet still insist on using a ‘gut and go’ tactic to eliminate hearing from the public, you know that even they are embarrassed by their actions,” Rapp said in a statement.

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