Suzanne Downing: Gasline bill filibustered to death by House confederacy of dunces

By SUZANNE DOWNING

May 19, 2026 – For hour after hour on Monday, lawmakers filed amendment after amendment onto Senate Bill 180, the vehicle that had become Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s effort to establish required tax parameters for the Alaska LNG project. Democrats filibustered the bill into exhaustion. House Speaker Bryce Edgmon let the clock drift toward midnight as the House repeatedly went into hours-long “at eases,” wandered off the floor, huddled in corners, and generally behaved like a Legislature trying desperately not to make a decision.

Meanwhile, the actual leverage game was happening elsewhere. The Democrat majority caucus had tied the long-sought-after gasline legislation to their prized defined-benefit pension bill. That is a bill to reestablish costly pensions for state workers. The message was obvious: Sign our pension bill, and maybe we’ll give you your gasline taxes. Veto it, and all bets are off.

So Alaska sat through an entire day of legislative performance art while the future of a multibillion-dollar energy project and the future pension liabilities of the state government were effectively being traded like poker chips.

Late Monday night, Dunleavy finally called their bluff and vetoed the pension bill. And just like that, Alaska ended up with neither -no gasline,  no lavish state worker benefits, no grand bargain. The final day of regular session is Wednesday.

This was another demonstration that the Alaska Legislature has become astonishingly incapable of governing. It is a confederacy of dunces.

The most bewildering moment of the night came when Rep. DeLena Johnson, the Republican minority leader from Palmer, cast the single vote that effectively killed the gasline bill.

Earlier in the evening, Rep. Robyn Niayuq Frier of Utqiagvik had successfully attached what amounted to a poison-pill amendment to SB 180. Amendment 21 onto Amendment 2 would have allowed the North Slope Borough and Kenai Peninsula Borough to negotiate their own separate tax agreements directly with Glenfarne, the project developer.

That might sound harmless enough to the casual observer. The entire point of the legislation was to create a stable, predictable tax structure that investors and lenders could rely upon. If individual boroughs could negotiate separate taxation schemes on the side, the certainty vanishes. Financing becomes harder, risk  increases, and the project is not viable. The governor made clear that this provision was a deal-killer.

Dunleavy indicated he would veto the bill if that amendment remained. So lawmakers held a vote to rescind Frier’s amendment. The vote was 20-20.

Now here’s what is mystifying: Every Republican except DeLena Johnson voted to remove the poison pill. Johnson voted no. That tie vote meant the rescission failed. And with it, the gasline bill was effectively doomed.

No one seems able to explain why the Republican House Minority leader did that, while her own caucus voted the other way.

Maybe there is some intricate strategic explanation that will emerge later. Maybe she was tired. Maybe she is just stupid and didn’t know what she was doing. Maybe there was confusion. Maybe there was a private deal nobody understands yet. Maybe it was simply a catastrophic misread of the moment.

From the outside, it looked like the Republican Minority leader handed the Democrats and anti-project forces the exact outcome they wanted: No gasline.

And make no mistake: there are absolutely members of this Legislature who are perfectly content to watch the Alaska LNG project die slowly in procedural quicksand.

The Democrats had already spent the day burying the bill under amendment after amendment. Two amendments tried to set the price of natural gas in Alaska, something that is far from the purview of the Legislature. Some amendments had little to do with the actual project. Others appeared designed mainly to consume time. It increasingly looked like leadership was prepared to simply run out the clock and let the session expire without resolution.

This is what legislative dysfunction looks like — endless procedural maneuvering substituting for leadership. Meanwhile, Alaska remains in an energy crisis trajectory.

Southcentral utilities are warning about looming gas shortages before the end of the decade The state desperately needs long-term energy security. The LNG project, the largest project in North America, represents one of the few transformational economic opportunities Alaska has left. And instead of rising to the moment, lawmakers spent the day playing factional games, testing leverage, protecting turf, and maneuvering for internal caucus advantage.

At some point, voters have to stop pretending this is normal. The Legislature now resembles a body that is structurally incapable of executing intelligent policy decisions without collapsing into chaos. Every issue becomes hostage-taking and every negotiation becomes brinkmanship. Every major bill turns into a Christmas tree of unrelated demands and political vendettas.

And in the end, nothing gets accomplished.

Maybe Gov. Dunleavy calls a special session focused solely on the gasline. He probably should. The project is too important to simply abandon because lawmakers melted down during the final 72 hours of session.

But even if a special session happens, Monday night exposed something deeper and more troubling than one failed bill: Alaska has a low-functioning Legislature at precisely the moment the state needs serious adults in the room.

And unfortunately, voters do bear some responsibility for this mess because eventually, you really do get the Legislature you vote for.

Suzanne Downing is founder and editor of The Alaska Story and is a longtime Alaskan who remembers the state before the Trans Alaska Pipeline was built.