By DAVID EASTMAN
Sept. 29, 2026 – It wasn’t until late on the night of May 20, that the regular legislative session finally came to an end. It was the 121st day. The final day of session is when special interests often cry the loudest and pressure on legislators reaches its peak.
Every two years, after the dust settles, we get to find out which portions of the Alaska Constitution gave way to political expediency that year, and which portions still remain intact.
You may remember, on the final day of the previous legislature — in 2024 — House legislators forgot themselves and claimed to pass five bills into law after the midnight constitutional deadline had already passed.
That attempt earned all five bills an immediate veto by Gov. Dunleavy. It wasn’t that he opposed the bills themselves, but that the precedent of legislators passing bills after the constitutional deadline was beyond the pale. In Alaska, legislators have more than enough power as it is, without reaching around the Constitution to grab at more.*
You may also remember from the final hours of that legislature that House legislators were not the only ones to forget themselves that day. Nineteen minutes before midnight, the Senate went even further by attempting to pass into law six separate bills with a single vote (Senate Bill 189).
The move was such an affront to the Constitution that Sen. Bert Stedman rose in the Senate to publicly condemn it, and Senators Stedman and Lyman Hoffman initially refused to vote either way on the bill. For my part, I shared similar warnings when the vote took place in the House.
See: Legislators Crossed the Line in Passing Senate Bill 189
Unlike the bills voted on after midnight, legislators were more strategic when it came to passing SB189. They ensured that at least one of the six bills crammed into SB189 was a bill that the governor desperately wanted. When the Department of Law determined that SB189 was unconstitutional, Gov. Dunleavy responded by refusing to publicly sign it into law, but he also stopped short of formally vetoing it. Under Alaska law, if the governor does not veto a bill like SB189, it goes into law without his signature, threatening to overturn decades of precedent and rendering Art II, Sec. 13 of the Constitution a dead letter.
With the help of a very capable attorney, Joe Geldhof, I filed my first lawsuit (Eastman v. State of Alaska). Together, we invited the court to uphold the Constitution or join the other two branches of government in publicly acknowledging that Art. II, Sec. 13 (the provision in our Constitution that limits each bill to a single subject) has now completely given way to political expediency.
After a seven month legal battle, the court rewarded our efforts by agreeing with the Department of Law that SB189 was indeed unconstitutional. Seeing the writing on the wall, and not wanting to lose any of the six bills, the legislature went back and passed the bills in SB189 as separate pieces of legislation.
For the moment, it would seem that Pandora’s Box is again closed. For the moment, legislators do not seem eager to keep voting past constitutional deadlines or trying to circumvent the governor’s veto by passing multiple bills with a single vote.
As he left the Constitutional Convention in 1787, Benjamin Franklin explained that the convention had produced “A republic, if you can keep it.” These days the emphasis falls squarely on “if you can keep it”.
In the final hours of a session, legislators are juggling countless priorities. Adherence to the Constitution is rarely one of them. Perhaps this is why more than 70% of Republican legislators joined 96% of Democrats in voting YES on SB189, despite knowing that it represented an abject surrender of constitutional safeguards. They knew that Dunleavy was unlikely to block it. They cracked the code on that by making sure it included a bill that would be politically difficult for him to veto.
Ultimately, in voting YES, they took part in a power grab forbidden by the Constitution.
I would be remiss if I left the impression that the outcome of a single lawsuit could reset the clock as though that step had never been taken. For legislators, it still remains easier politically to set aside constitutional safeguards than it is to vote NO on a popular piece of legislation. Most may never intentionally set out to flout the Constitution as much as simply be ok with not following it when it runs afoul of their politics. Therein lies the problem.
In a Republic such as ours, legislators are the ones principally entrusted with enforcing the Constitution when it comes to their own conduct. Let that sink in.
What happens when they choose not to? The governor can’t compel them to. No matter how egregious their conduct, the governor and attorney general are constitutionally barred from even filing a lawsuit against legislators. Treg Taylor once tried to. It didn’t go well.
Yes, all public officials in Alaska take an oath to defend the Constitution, but legislators are given unique tools with which to enforce that oath. The power to impeach public officials and to remove legislators from office is a power that only members of the legislature are able to exercise. The power to reduce or eliminate public funding on a project or activity is ultimately entrusted to members of the legislature. The power to criminalize conduct and to put forward amendments to the Constitution, these are tools entrusted to the legislative branch of government; not the courts, not the governor.
The governor doesn’t send troopers to arrest legislators when they thumb their nose at the Constitution and pass unconstitutional bills. The courts don’t issue arrest warrants and send out bailiffs when legislators vote to violate your constitutional right to due process or the right to bear arms in the Alaska Constitution. The practical reality of this often escapes the public.
When it comes to enforcing the Constitution on legislators, legislators answer only to themselves and to the voters at election time. Legislators are the only public officials who are specifically exempted by the Constitution from being arrested. For better and for worse, legislators are granted an exceptionally high level of public trust. When other legislators fail to act, and the public fails to weigh in at the ballot box, legislators effectively answer to no one. When legislators grow sufficiently accustomed to answering to no one, they begin passing bills after constitutional deadlines and attempting to do things like pass half a dozen bills with a single vote. District attorneys are one of the few other public officials who enjoy a similar level of public trust.
In an incident in New York, the District Attorney of Monroe County was caught driving 20 miles over the speed limit. What happened next was what made the video of her traffic stop go viral. She simply refused to pull over. Instead, she drove home, parked in her garage, and told police to get lost.
On video, she openly mocked the responding police officers, “Do you think I really care if I was going 20 miles over the speed limit?” In a rare moment of candor for a public official, she said the quiet part out loud: “I’m the DA….If you give me a ticket that’s fine. I’m the one who prosecutes it,” leaving no doubt as to what she intended to do with the ticket once police left her house. While she was being pulled over, she even called up the police chief (on camera) and asked him to tell his officers to “leave me alone”.
It is difficult to find clearer imagery of just how unconcerned politicians in Juneau can be about enforcing constitutional safeguards than District Attorney Sandra Doorley ignoring commands to stop, leading police to her house, and then casually walking into her house. Call it the swamp. Call it corruption. Call it the good ol’ boys club. It doesn’t much matter what you call it.
SB189, and the subsequent court case, highlight a very specific example of legislators abandoning the public trust and stepping outside the Constitution. There are others of course.
Under the Alaska Constitution, Alaska voters have the right to vote on new public debt at the ballot box. As a freshman legislator, I watched as legislators (the vast majority of them Republican) voted to ignore that right when they attempted to pass HB331 and $1 billion in new state bonds without allowing the public to vote. In a ruling that should have surprised no one, the Alaska Supreme Court found that it was manifestly unconstitutional.
Yet, only two members of the House Republican Caucus, myself and Rep. Mark Neuman, voted against it. We have a problem.
That problem has now metastasized to the point where a Republican legislator who consistently sides with the Constitution is now accused of being out of step with their fellow Republican legislators. They are. That is the problem. Before embarking on any project to restore public trust in the legislature we must first come to grips with how far into the swamp our legislature has already moved.
*While the Alaska Constitution permits as many as 242 days of regular sessions in a two-year period, the Texas Constitution limits its legislators to only 140 days in the same time period. State law, passed by Alaska voters in 2006, is also more generous than Texas, allowing legislators up to 180 days of regular sessions in a two-year period.
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David Eastman is a former Alaska House representative for Wasilla and a current candidate for House.
One thought on “David Eastman: When Alaska lawmakers break the rules, who holds them accountable?”
Great article, David. Are you running for office this fall?