Joe Sonka
Enterprise Statehouse ReporterJoe Sonka is Kentucky Public Radio’s first enterprise statehouse reporter. He joined the team in October 2023.
Joe has covered Kentucky government and politics for nearly two decades. He grew up in Lexington and moved to Louisville in 2011, covering city and state government at LEO Weekly and then Insider Louisville. He became state government reporter for the Courier Journal in 2019 and was a lead reporter for the newspaper's 2020 Pulitzer Prize-winning series on former Gov. Matt Bevin's controversial pardons just before leaving office.
You can email Joe at jsonka@lpm.org and find him at non-Twitter apps such as Threads (@joesonkaky) and BlueSky (@joesonka.bsky.social).
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A state House committee advanced a bill to fully strip the Kentucky governor’s power to fill a U.S. Senate vacancy, just a day after McConnell announced he will step down from his Senate leadership position.
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After Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell announced that he would step down from Senate leadership in November, GOP legislative leaders praised his legacy of building his party’s power and delivering federal funding back home in Kentucky.
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Student IDs are rarely used to vote and have no verifiable connection to election fraud, but a bill to exclude them as a primary voter ID has advanced through the Kentucky Senate.
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Hundreds of organizations spent nearly $3 million to lobby the Kentucky General Assembly in January, with the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce leading the way.
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Competing gambling interests, “dark money” nonprofits, businesses and labor unions were among those bankrolling two key political groups that spent $29 million trying to swing Kentucky’s race for governor last year.
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The proposed constitutional amendment would allow the Kentucky General Assembly to call itself back into special sessions, which voters rejected in a 2022 ballot referendum.
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The state budget passed by the Kentucky House last week included a last-minute amendment to completely defund a heralded statewide program steering criminal defendants to drug treatment instead of prison.
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Proposed Kentucky legislation follows a national push to regulate the use of social media by minors, requiring users to verify their age and parents to authorize the child’s account.
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The amended Kentucky House budget fully funds school transportation for the first time in decades, increases per pupil funding, bolsters infrastructure spending and pays into the unfunded liability of the state's public pension system.
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Despite a push last year by Kentucky Republican legislators and Louisville’s Democratic mayor to expand wiretapping powers for state and local law enforcement, a bill to do so is not likely to be filed in the 2024 session of the General Assembly.