Time now for a midweek check in of some major political developments this week so far with our good friend Rylan Barden with Kentucky Public Radio.

Good to see you.

Good to see you, too, Renee.

So the election is over.

That's in the rearview.

Now, the task of governing and policy making, it's ahead of us.

Starting January 2nd, the lawmaking session begins in Frankfurt.

What sense are you getting about what the legislative priorities are for, particularly the super majority?

Well, Republican leaders of the legislature are still trying to identify a couple more conservative policies that they can pass.

They really knocked out some of the big ones in recent years, you know, really regulating abortion, a pretty much out of existence in Kentucky at this point.

Also passing some of the, you know, big right to work bills, thinking right in when Reagan Republicans took control, the legislature in 2017, in January.

But they still want to get some work done on a school choice measures.

And so there's a constitutional amendment that has been floated to really crack open the state's ban on public dollars from being spent on nonpublic education.

Is this is something that lawmakers have tried to pass in the form of a tax credit that would go towards people who donate to scholarships for private schools.

So kind of a backdoor into funding some private school education, helping kids go to private schools.

This has been billed as a school choice measure and some Republicans are in favor of it.

I'm really interested to see how this plays out during the session, because this is one of those issues that's reliably been able to split Republicans.

The Republican caucus, which, you know, is so big at this point, they have room for not everybody to be in line on that particular issue.

But nonetheless, it's been a complicated issue in recent years going back to Charter schools, going back to this scholarship child tax credit when it first tried to pass out of the legislature, but it was then ultimately struck down by courts.

So that's one of them.

Obviously, there they've already proposed a big public safety bill, which they'll be discussing in the coming weeks before the legislative session.

I think they're going to want to get something passed on that.

But also it's a big budget year, so a lot of thinking to be done on on how to how to spend the state's dollars in thinking, too, on on what revenue is going to look like going forward as Republicans continue to say they want to lower the state's income tax.

Some are even advocating for totally eliminating it, which would really require a huge shift to sales taxes, consumption based taxes, which some folks are worried about because it's a it's a regressive tax.

Folks who don't have as much money end up spending a greater share of their incomes buying things.

And so the sales tax would affect them a lot more than richer folks who get to to save some of that extra money.

But also, we're hearing that there could be some room and temperature to actually examine more fully exemptions for rape and incest to Kentucky's near-total abortion ban.

So there are some new developments on that conversation this week.

Yeah, but the House speaker and Senate president, I believe, if I'm not too badly mistaken, said that they were hearing that a conversation out there, there weren't any specifics here, but especially after the after this year's election where Governor Andy Beshear went very forcefully on this issue, holding Republican opponents and Berens feet to the fire in not supporting exceptions to the to the state's total ban on abortion.

So it seems like there's some daylight here for some Republicans wanting to consider this.

This is a very complicated issue or politically complicated issue that is, it's it's going to be really hard to imagine some some anti-abortion Republicans being swayed by some of these arguments, although some already have have changed their minds on this.

Nobody's really talking very openly about this discussion right now.

And it will have to be talked about at some point in the legislative session.

If anything's going to pass, though, for these bills to come up in committee and then ultimately pass off the floor.

As you mentioned, the Republican leaders, the House Speaker, David Osborne, the Senate president, Robert Stivers and others have also signaled their intentions or not their intentions to work with the newly reelected Democratic governor, Andy Beshear.

So how is that going to go?

Do you think they're going to all get along and sing Kumbaya, or will it be a fight on day one?

It seems like there's going to be a fight on day one to see what the saber rattling continues between the legislature and the governor's office.

I think that it's almost just a political reality that that's going to happen openly.

I do wonder if there might be a little bit better communication behind the scenes between the governor's office and the legislature, because really, of all the of all the referenda there are a governor's race and a Democrat winning that election.

You know, it really shows that the people of Kentucky are were into what he had to offer here.

And so Republican lawmakers might do well to kind of go along with what this popularly elected statewide official is pushing for.

Obviously, there's going to be a lot of differences here, but it maybe this year, especially when they're writing a state budget, you know, which sometimes gets very nonpartisan, that they'll be able to work a little closely together.

But we'll really see how that plays out once the legislature is back in session on January 2nd.

I guess one other note on this issue is that Republican leaders also say they'll plan to release their budget ahead of their proposed budget, ahead of the governor once again, which that was a bit of a snub last time around that the governor really?

Yeah, our Laura Rogers asked that question.

The Democratic to the Republican House speaker, David Osborne, last Tuesday and got that response.

The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee is embarking this is the national organizing organization is embarking on a, let's say, multistate endeavor, seven figures to target these supermajorities, Republican supermajorities that have a Democratic governor.

And Kentucky is on the list with Kansas and Wisconsin and North Carolina.

What do we know about this?

Yeah, this is a really seismic change in how the national Democratic groups have treated states, red states like Kentucky or states that have become very red like Kentucky.

There hasn't been a lot of investment in some of these local elections.

And this is what Republicans did ahead of the 2010 elections.

So in the early 2000s, when they just kind of decided at one point, instead of, say, wasting $60 million on a Senate race, U.S. Senate race in Massachusetts, that they're going to lose.

What if we took that money and applied it to state legislatures across the country?

And it seems like Democrats are trying to start doing this, actually started investing in and trying to build up their benches.

And in some of these increasingly red states like Kentucky.

It's hard to imagine the Democratic Party here, even without a real low point historically.

And the Republican parties have a real high watermark.

So this this might begin that process of kind of evening out, which, you know, especially after a statewide election like this with a Democratic governor winning.

I think Democrats see that there's a little bit more interplay here and there, and they're wanting to pick up some more of those seats, especially in suburban areas and then in other places are then really not not totally relinquishing control of rural areas as well.

Yeah, well, we'll have to leave it there.

We'll pick up again next week perhaps.

And also on Inside Kentucky Politics with Bob Cabbage and Trey Grayson.

We'll go over a few things then.

Thank you so much, Ron and Bardens.

Good to see you.

Thanks for.