Making Legislation

This blog entry is from Monday, June 30. Because of what it discusses, staff in two different Congressional offices had to read it and give me permission to post it. So, even though it’s just being posted now, I think you’ll still find it current and interesting.

Making Legislation

Although I've only been working at the Capitol for one week, I've learned a considerable amount about the nature of how laws get made. It's been fascinating to talk with the staff in Congressman Altmire's office. Each has an important role to play, as I explained in an earlier blog entry. Together, they accomplish the behind-the-scenes work of the legislative aspect of our government. On Friday, June 27, I had the opportunity to speak with a legislative assistant for another Representative. Her office has been actively involved in sponsoring two different bills dealing with education. I was curious to know more about the preparation involved in preparing these two bills. I spoke with her for an hour and a half, and I'd like to share with you her extremely clear and helpful answers to my many questions.

Ideas for possible laws come from many different sources. Sometimes the idea for a law comes from the numerous letters a Congressman's office receives every day. Sometimes the idea comes from a constituent who visits a Congressman's office and speaks with a member of the Congressman's legislative staff. Sometimes the idea comes from an interest group committed to specific cause. Sometimes the idea comes from the Congressman himself and deals with an issue that is important to him and his constituents. Often, the idea for a law comes from all of these sources.

I spoke with this legislative assistant about a bill her office introduced. This bill would award grants to schools to promote and strengthen curriculum in music and arts, foreign languages, civics and government, economics, history, geography, and physical education and health. The Representative heard from constituents and others around the country that schools might be dropping classes in the subjects mentioned above. These school districts said it was because they had limited funding or time, and they needed to spend this funding and time on math and reading in order to meet the Adequate Yearly Progress requirements for No Child Left Behind. Unfortunately, many of the students who had difficulty in math and reading but who shined in music, art, and other areas were now not getting the opportunity to take these classes. So the Representative’s bill was designed to address this issue.

Hence, the first step in making a law is identifying some "need." In this case, the need was to provide additional funding to allow districts to continue providing instruction in music, art, history, and other areas. The second step in the process is to gather information. In order for this bill to pass, it needed to be prepared carefully, based on as much data as possible, tailored with compromises, and made broad enough in order to get as many interest groups on board as possible. Some of the statistical information for this bill came from the Center on Education Policy, which heads up many different research studies in different areas of education. The statistics showed that the shifts in instructional time were quite large, even as much as cutting 75 minutes per week in both Social Studies and Science to significantly increase instructional time in Reading and Math.

The wording for the eventual bill came in part from a music and art interest group, who had been working for years to gain support for more of a focus on music and arts education in schools. They also worked with a special, separate staff who is not assigned to any particular Congressman but who is assigned to the Committee on Education and Labor as a whole. The language was then revised to official standards by the Office of Legislative Counsel, made up of lawyers who understand the intricacies of legal language.

Once the bill is written, the Representative’s staff put together a "Dear Colleague" letter and sent it out to all the Congressmen and women. This letter explained the main parts of the bill and why they believed its passage was necessary. The purpose of the letter was to try to gain cosponsors for the bill. Then, the Representative’s staff did something very clever with their bill. Instead of making it a "stand-alone" bill, they attached the bill to the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act. Hence, this made it more likely their bill would get passed because it was attached to the passage of the entire Act.

The Representative then proposed the bill on the floor of the House of Representatives. After this, the Speaker of the House, with advice from the Parliamentarian, decides to which committee the bill is assigned. Sometimes, a bill has the potential to be assigned to more than one committee. So that this doesn't happen, most Congressmen try to narrowly tailor their bill so that it fits more with one specific committee.

Why would this be such a big deal? Remember – the committee who gains control over a bill has the most power over shaping the nature of the bill and deciding whether it gets passed out of Committee and onto the floor of the House of Representatives. The Legislative Assistant explained an example of why a Committee has so much power. She told me that when a bill is brought up in Committee, the Clerk reads the bill. If the bill is really long, you can ask for unanimous consent to not have the Clerk read the whole bill. One political party might refuse to give their consent if they want to stall the bill. She told me that one time, the Clerk had to read a bill that was 1,000 pages long, which gave the political party more time to come up with amendments to the bill.

I also asked the Legislative Assistant about the role of lobbyists. A lobbyist is a person who represents an interest group and who tries to get Congressmen to pass legislation that helps their interest group and to oppose legislation that hurts their interest group. The Legislative Assistant in the Representative’s office explained that no one interest group has more say than any other interest group. She said that she meets with lobbyists from all interest groups, often representing conflicting sides of an issue. The Legislative Assistant explained, "we write the policy but don't implement it. So it's helpful to talk to the people who do." While the idea for a bill might be suggested by an interest group, the bill that eventually gets passed has been shaped by many different groups of people.

This blog entry is already very long, so I'll just tell you one exciting event from today. This morning I wrote a memo to Congressman Altmire on a different bill than the one I discussed above. When the legislative assistants receive a "Dear Colleague" letter, which, as I explained above, is a letter asking the Congressman to cosponsor a specific bill, the legislative assistants write a one page memo to the Congressman. This memo summarizes the main points in the bill, explains a brief history of the issues prompting the creation of the bill, lists the sponsor of the bill (who proposed it) and the number of cosponsors, and explains any interest groups that might show opposition to the bill. I had to call two different interest groups on the phone to ask about their potential opposition to the bill. Because the memo is only supposed to be one page long and because the Legislative Director told me "the shorter the better," most of my time was spent trying to cut out any unnecessary wording in order to make it fit on one page and be as clear and concise as possible. As you have probably noticed from the length of my blog entries, this is not an easy task for me to do!

Addendum: Congressman Altmire approved my memo yesterday (July 9) so he is going to cosponsor the bill!