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This year's legislative session ended last week, and it's always interesting to compare what lawmakers have in mind

in those early days to what they actually get done by the end. If you're a conservative culture

warrior, going into the session, you had an impressively ambitious list. There were bills targeting

undocumented immigrants. There was a bill to erase transgender rights from state law.

Students required to watch anti-abortion videos and school health classes. But what actually

happened this year, for whatever reason, was that those kinds of bills didn't make it.

Lawmakers had less patience with the flashy rhetorical stuff. Our colleagues in the newsroom described the session as more like an admin day, with the energy

focused on technical government business rather than big culture war fights.

It could have been sensitivity to the midterms.

It could have been fatigue with Donald Trump, but as the political consultants

Jackie Morgan and Gabby Finlayson told us, sometimes extreme ideas just run up against

the basic process of shepherding a bill through the system.

It's what they call the small pea politics.

And the perfect example of that this year was the Republican representative from Leighton, Trevor Lee.

He's one of the newer representatives, and he has made quite the name for himself.

You know, online, he's used slurs.

He is someone who is very honest about being xenophobic, homophobic, transphobic, anti-woman, anti-immigrant. So people were

very nervous about what he would do and curious to see how it would go for him. He started session

coming out of the gates swinging with his bill on Harvey Milk Boulevard, changing that to Charlie

Kirk Boulevard.

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