patrick.net

As you may already know, bills are filed, then sequentially sent to two or more committees. They are read three times on each floor, pass interim votes, and then a final vote in each chamber to pass them into law. An identical bill must pass both House and Senate, and lawmakers can offer amendments along the way, which themselves pass or fail by a vote. During this process, bills can “die” for lots of reasons, such as never being passed out of committee, being poisoned with an obnoxious amendment, not being scheduled for a vote until it’s too late, or if the House and Senate bill don’t match.

More bills die than get passed. That’s how it works.

So far, so good. But here’s what I didn’t know, and you probably don’t know either. The House Speaker and the Senate President are incredibly powerful positions. They control the schedule of votes and can kill a bill by ignoring it — never scheduling it for a vote. And — this is the really important part — the Speaker and the Senate President each have their own legislative agendas and serve as ringmasters or shepherds for the most important bills of each session.

By some kind of tradition, governors are given the courtesy of a certain number of bills, let’s say two dozen, that the Senate President and the House Speaker agree to schedule for a final vote each session. Those are “governor’s priority bills,” are usually drafted by the governor’s office, and are delivered to the Speaker and the Senate President.

The Speaker and Senate President then “assign” the governor’s priority bills to reliable lawmakers, who agree to sponsor and file them.

Similarly, the Speaker and President pass out their own bills, the ones in their own legislative strategy, which are also sponsored and filed by reliable party members. With me so far?

And here’s where things get really interesting.

The governor depends on the Speaker and the Senate President to advance his bills, so he’s constantly negotiating with them. The Speaker and the Senate President also depend on each other to pass their own priority bills, since bills ultimately must match and be passed in both chambers. So they are also constantly negotiating with each other. Since they need the governor to sign their priority bills, they’re always negotiating with him too.

It’s a three-way. Just not THAT kind of three-way.

The individual lawmakers who sponsor these priority bills usually DO NOT CARE about the bill’s contents. They couldn’t care less. It’s just a duty. They may not even read the bills; it doesn’t matter. It’s just part of their job to sponsor priority bills when asked. Lawmakers may file their own bills, but when they do come up with something on their own, their non-priority bills face a much more difficult and creative path to becoming law than do the priority bills of the governor, Senate President, or Speaker.

The reality is that there is an absolute limit to how many bills the legislature can possibly debate and pass in any particular session. Priority bills come first. Many good bills die just because the legislative session ran out before the good, non-priority bills could be read, debated, and voted on.

That’s also why filibustering works so effectively. Filibustering consumes valuable time for passing other bills, not just the one being filibustered.

So here is the first important take-away: calling or lobbying a bill’s sponsor might not make any difference at all, especially if it’s a priority bill. They don’t care. Second, it’s not good enough to just find a friendly lawmaker to file a bill for you. If you REALLY want to pass a bill, you’d better start with the Governor, Senate President or the House Speaker.

That’s what lobbyists for businesses and organizations like the NRA and the Chamber of Commerce do. They organize support for bills, either doing it the easy way, starting at the top and getting a priority bill filed, or by building up lots of grassroots lawmaker support to stitch together an artificial priority, which is obviously much harder and more time-consuming.

But it gets even weirder. Because of all the inter-branch negotiating, the three branches conceal which bills are their most important priorities, so that the other branches won’t use that knowledge to get negotiating leverage. So until pretty late in the session, nobody is ever entirely sure which are the most important bills, the priority bills, the ones that will definitely get passed during the session.

So it’s all very murky and hush-hush. Loose lips sink ships and all that rot. Trying to figure out which bills are the priority ones is like trying to figure out what Joe Biden meant to say. You can never really be sure.

I’m not saying this is a “good” process or a “bad” process. It’s just how it works. The best you can say about it is that it creates TONS of checks and balances. As Theodore Roosevelt famously said, “Democracy is like a raft; it won’t sink, but your feet are always wet.”

Even worse, our party can sometimes be a little dysfunctional. Like Mark Twain, I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Republican.