Notes From the Floor

Dirty Water

It is photo day. The photographers come in and set up shop on the Senate floor. They call Senator Davis "Bart" and move us around like Barbie Dolls. It is humbling and fabulous, even as we set our silly faces in fixer for the very serious rows of photos that will next year again grace the Capitol building walls. Formidable, goofy, haggard, odd. We stare down, mostly in black and white, white face after white face, year after year since Statehood.

Some days amaze me. I sit in committee and I feel a bit shameless. We are debating in all seriousness the idea of drawing an arbitrary line where laws protecting our state's water do not apply… not just for a little while, until someone cleans it up… but potentially forever. Lead and mercury and copper and phosphates… and in a voice vote we set precedent. We say OK, for perpetuity we draw a line, law applies out here on this side but not here inside the circle.

And an hour later we are voting to let sewage leach into lakes and streams and not taking into account the cost in human health of hepatitis and Giardia or the cost to taxpayers of cleaning up polluted groundwater and drinking water under towns and lake communities. But we sit and listen to the passionate and the ones who have to make the most obvious payments on legislative change. The man who can't build on the lake because his lot is too small for the new rules. So we reject the rules. Those who pay in health or taxes, down the line, years from now, they won't be here to testify today. We get just a snapshot in time. We get now. And if we can not as thinking beings think ahead, that is all we will ever have to base our vote on. Now.

Too High to See Their Eyes

Home by the wood stove. The weight of tomorrow's first vote on budgets hangs there as I walk out of the brown marble halls and home through the fog and frost. What might look like numbers on a page are jobs, things not bought from Idaho businesses, smaller pay checks. Lives.

We had Joint Finance and Appropriations Committee (JFAC) school today. Five of us are new on the twenty member committee. Jim Patrick and three of us Democrats sat like children at the feet of Cathy Holland Smith, JFAC director, patient teacher and former wizard of prison and health budgets. She speaks slowly, smiles a lot and tucks gems into budget writing stories and seeming off-hand bits of advice.

This morning in committee we went through maybe 20 pages solid with numbers. If you drift for a second, whole parts of a page are lost and figuring it out means that you miss what comes next. And every number has something to do with someone's life. Do I grasp and picture what every number means fully? I don't think anyone knows all the lands where the parks are to be built, the people who say they need new ballistics vests, the people who have survived a bit of life because they could check in to Franklin House rather than facing a break down alone, in a cold hospital or in the very home situation that helped them to the brink? I try.

As a member of this committee we are given a book that is six inches thick, and, front to back in numbers says how more than two billion dollars in sales and income taxes flow out over the state, to hospitals, fire crews, social workers, judges, women who teach high school courses to men in one of the State Prisons.

Scott Bedke, long time budget writer, poked his head into our little class room. He is one of the brightest and is now a member of house leadership. There was a time, when I was a freshman years ago when he spoke kindly of me, said I had potential or smarts. He used numbers to say it. Now he steers clear more. I've challenged House leadership in more ways than I can count. I know it tarnishes how sweet I might have seemed and makes me into something more sinister than a young law maker who is OK with numbers. I'm graying and serving in the Senate and he is in charge of the House Republican caucus now.

Scott's advice to our little JFAC class was that we pull back to an altitude, 40,000 ft, to vote on budgets. Others have said this as well and today I know why. If you are too low you have to look into everyone's eyes as you vote.

We have to cut hundreds of millions out of next year's budget soon. How can you look in that many eyes? I think you try. You ask for understanding and you work to protect the most vulnerable. That is so relative. The most vulnerable. You might agree not build a park in order that more people can get medical care. Still the cement company owner may close down and the man who hoped to get a job there will have none. But these are the choices we make. How many people can we feed with one park?

From 40,000 feet the food line stretches pretty far and the park sits gated and empty and waits until later. The cement truck owner joins the food line. And we look out over the mountains and hope everyone is willing to step up and make a little sacrifice of their own. I will. I have a list because I know now how much others are giving up. When I come down from 40,000 feet I look into their eyes.

Ethics in Theory

It is a wild and wonderful thing to watch new legislators contemplate the pressures they will be under to deliver for constituents and especially for lobbyists.

Wednesday in legislator school we ran through scenarios… You are flown by an industry group to a speaking engagement and offered free golf and hotel and air fare. The industry group will have legislation for you to vote on in the upcoming session. Another: As a legislator voting on a bill that deregulates your company's industry, if you knew that the bill might pass or fail by one or two votes would you disclose your conflict and go ahead and vote as the law says you should, or is this a conflict where you should not vote? Another: your neighbor asks you to write a letter to an agency to get the director to give your neighbor a contract in an open bid
process, yet you happen to serve on the Joint Finance Committee where
you oversee that agency director's budget.

Not everyone in the room agreed on the answers. I'm not sure the legislative leaders presenting the ethics portion agreed on the answers.

Personally I see lessons to be learned: 1) be very careful what you ask from someone you have power over. It takes next to nothing to imply consequence. 2) On voting, the law says we must, regardless of conflict, vote. I'd ask, should we really if the vote is so heavily divided and there are really winners and losers in this deregulation? Isn't it possible that those who are adversely impacted are not represented in the legislature and that your representing your industry to your legislative friends and colleagues in support of this legislation has skewed the objectivity of the process?

If you hang out around the legislature and our current digs in the old Ada County Courthouse even a little, or if you go to the taxpayers conference and count the industry lobbyists mixed in with the local and legislative elected officials, it feels odd. All the money moving around can get to feel normal though after awhile if you don't keep pinching yourself. I'd disagree with the the legal experts from the Attorney General's office who said that if we report the all the gifts, dinners, air tickets and hotel stays and don't promise anyone any votes, we'll be OK. I've generally returned campaign donations from corporate or business PACs. But look at the Sunshine reports someday where all we legislators get our campaign money. It is very interesting.  http://www.sos.idaho.gov/elect/Finance/2008scan.htm

We each draw our own lines and make our own claims about whether we are influenced or not. In Idaho law, esteemed Senators like Bart Davis will admit there is a difference between what is ethical and what is legal and warn us not to fall down in the court of public opinion by thinking legality is all that matters. Ethics experts like Kate Kelly have labored to create better laws. Yet the Ags office is assigned to defend that what legislators are doing by common practice is legal. As the law stands, we as legislators are supposed to decide for ourselves what is ethical and just, even if it is technically legal. 

Out of the Fog

On a day like today when the old Ada County Courthouse rises up out of the still green grass into the fog, inside the stairs are surprisingly grand. Sound echoes off the muraled walls, hodge podge furniture and stone steps

Soon 105 legislators from around Idaho will pack suits and shoes, name badges and file folders of legislation and come to Boise to live in apartments, vacant homes, condos, basement rooms and penthouses. Some share a place while others rent a room in a house. Many stay in hotel suites or simple rooms at the Safari Inn.

When we are sworn in Thursday morning. There will be no place to watch, no gallery as there was in the Statehouse, but people will watch online, through glass doors, or from the viewing rooms on TV screens on the first floor. 

We choose legislative leadership this year and every year following an election: A Speaker or Pro Tem who governs the Majority and Minority caucuses and a Leader, Assistant Leaders and Caucus chair for each the Republican and Democratic Caucuses.

With only one seat net change in the number of Democrats and Republicans in the Idaho legislature, it might seem that this election brought little change to the Capitol. That is not entirely true. The house elected several more conservative members to fill the shoes of moderate Republicans. This means that Republican leadership is unlikely to change this year, but the House Democratic leadership is set to see some turnover with George Sayler leaving as Assistant Minority leader. There will be decisions for Democratic legislators to make by secret ballot over dinner. Who holds the respect? Who thinks strategically? Who speaks well without hand-holding? Who would the Democratic Caucus of 18 be willing to follow?

The Senate in its more deliberative way does much based on seniority, in both the Democratic and Republican caucuses. Senate Republicans gained only one freshman member, Chuck Winder from Eagle. But on top of that four of us from the House have moved to the Senate this year, two Republicans and two Democrats.

If Gov. Otter appoints Senator Geddes or Senator Little to the vacant Lt. Governor's positions, there will be Republican leadership races on the Senate side and that could mean serious change. Democratic Leadership in the Senate has already worked out who will replace David Langhorst who bravely ran for County Commissioner and will be much missed in the Senate.

There will be much to watch this week as the legislature convenes its "Organizational Session."

We will chose seats and committees and it is possible some committee chairships will change hands as well. Undoubtedly the many new seats on the joint Finance Committee will also help change the dynamics on key issues and legislation and how we balance the budget while maintaining the housing, medical, food assistance and job training services Idahoans need most in worrisome economic times like these.

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See http://www.idahoptv.org/leglive/ to watch Thursday on-line.

Challenging the Speaker

If you have one member of leadership on your side, you have half a prayer. Just now, our Minority Leader,  Rep. Jaquet made sudden a motion to concur with Senate Amendments to H599 and create a $75,000 exemption to the business personal property tax. We fly by a little white spiral bound book of rules. What we can do is limited by that. This was one option in rule 37. The Speaker we believe was going to move the bill to the Rev & Tax Committee where we believed we would have a tie vote on any motion to concur or not concur with the Senate version of the bill. So we thought maybe the floor was the better place to have this fight. Last week, by 5 votes, the House sent the full $120 million exemption to the Senate. We feel we have enough people who would prefer this small business version of the bill to get a floor vote to pass it. Some want to kill the bill, others want to amend it for a third time, which would be very very risky, even in a conference committee of both the House and Senate. We shall see how this unfolds.

The Speaker claims Rep Jaquet’s motion is out of order and is calling her motion a "challenge to the Speaker" with brings emotional and partisan weight to this debate. The vote we take now will not be so much then on policy and on small businesses or taxes, but on party allegiance. I think you can predict the out come. Things are flying: rule books, emotions, lobbyists, leaders, whispers.

Choosing a Lobbyist

Thinking about where we are today on an issue I care about almost as much as any other, I offer a few things to consider when choosing a lobbyist for your legislation:

1) Don’t choose a lobbyist whose career has been dedicated to a cause a vast majority of legislators hated.
2) Make sure your lobbyist does not believe that the legislature is like the real world in that people forgive mistakes and that good intentions count for something.
3) You might want to be cautious choosing a well known and powerful lobbyist whose bread and butter rests on relationships with members of leadership who are deadly opposed to your issue. If you think this lobbyist is going to draw the line and cut off negotiations or work around their friends, forget it.
4) Don’t ever think that an unknown face is a bad thing. The friendly nature in us gets the best of us and we usually are intrigued by someone new. Let’s just say this too: no history, no baggage.
5) Consider it imporatant that your lobbyist sees communication and respect as the most important responsibility they have.
6) And finally, you might consider seeing what reaction your lobbyist has to any likely legislative allies you already have on the issue. While they might be the smoothest talker in town, will they really be willing to work with everyone or will they anger those who care about the cause so that nothing gets done.

How Long

    I’m sure many Idahoans are wondering just how long this session will last. This session which was supposed to be expedited, which began in dark of winter and now has languished into the time that crocus are wilted and tulips are working on flowers inside their tough green skins.
    I can say this. The length of a session is largely about ego. Who will give first? There are definite power dynamics and struggle between conservative House leadership and the moderate Senate. Then there are the dynamics between the governor and the legislature. This is an election year so the fear of raising taxes creates a tension over not fully funding substance abuse programs and failing to address shortfalls in transportation funding. Shifts in funding and taxes seem to be fair game as we have moved items like the state police off transportation budgets on to the general fund (the sales and income tax dollars which fund all our health, safety and social service programs.) But we seem to have moved beyond real debates over how to raise even just the $50 million or so for paying for the debt service on our GARVEE highway project loans. We’ve even abandon talk of raising the beer and wine taxes for the first time in many decades to provide more substance abuse funding to avoid the need for even more costly prison expansion and backlogs in those who need treatment for meth, heroin or alcohol addiction.
    With all legislative elections falling every two years, you seen the willingness to think ahead vanish every two years.
    So here we are diving into April we know we have an even more difficult year ahead for revenue, where tax dollars coming in may, because of the economy, force us to cut essential services. We are with S1447 already on the verge of making this year’s budget balance on the backs of state retirees, cutting their allowance for supplemental health coverage and leaving them at the whims of private insurance companies who can raise retirees rates at will, leaving many services uncovered and prescription drug coverage sliding into the donut hole.
     When will it end? Not necessarily next week, but probably. It all depends on whether House leadership digs in on their big business version of personal property tax breaks. It depends on whether the Governor who came in a day late with with half baked transportation solutions bothers to come up with something sensible and balanced.
    We as democrats have proposed solutions, most of which are no longer on the table, most were never given hearings, because after all this is an election year and who can allow democrats to solve problems. But we know that. We shape the process in other ways, through amendments and through working with the Senate. Someday, maybe not so long from now we will be in the majority. We will gain the 16 seats we need in the House to set the committee agendas and choose to spend wisely and with forethought to save taxpayer dollars by not always waiting until things bleed and fall into expensive crises of meth addiction, over flowing prisons, dirty air and water and limping transit alternatives. Someday. But for this year we push and run back and forth to the Senate whispering mutual plots and plans. I’ve worn a pair of shoes out so the nails have come up through the soles and the rain comes in.
    When will it end? Hopefully after a bill or two is finally changed and another killed. So, soon, while we have half a chance of being sure no more damage to the future is done.
      

Shenanigans

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Quite a moment in Committee this morning. Chairman Lake banged the gavel and the 18 of us committee members were starting a to hear testimony from the public on a bill which had been granted a hearing with a majority vote the day before. Suddenly the chairman addressed the committee in his formal, friendly way and announced that we would have our hearing on a different draft of the bill instead, a substantially changed version which the committee did not pass and did not approve at any time, and in fact had not yet seen.

As Democrats, we sit together in a row at a leg of the table on one side of the room. We looked at each other and I raised my hand. I objected, pointing out that it was improper to substitute one bill with another bill, when the committee approved only the one of them. I also pointed out that it was particularly a problem that the changed bill would affect people in North Idaho who clearly were not at today’s hearing and would have not chance to comment on how the bill would affect them and the local option sales tax which they use for property tax relief.

The Chair shrugged off the discussion saying we’d take testimony. As the few speakers wrapped up, the chair announced that we would not vote today but would have a hearing instead tomorrow on the new bill. The chair mentioned that since we had "an agreement" in the last committee meeting to hear this other draft, we would do that instead of voting on the broad local option sales tax authority we had just heard testimony on.

You know sometimes it takes a second for an incongruity to register. When you hear it, there is that moment of delay while your memory registers that no such thing took place. Rep. Jaquet pointed out that we were part of no agreement at any time on this bill and that the agreement clearly took place within republican leadership. (There is no such agreement in the committee minutes.) Chairman Lake smiled and looked down ready to adjourn the meeting without a vote on the bill people had just come to testify on.

Rep. Jaquet raised her hand and made a motion to approve the existing bill anyway. She moved to send HB 688, the broad local option tax authority bill, to the floor with a due pass recommendation. Rep. Lake squirmed and smiled and said that it would be his call. Even with a motion on the table, he adjourned the committee, no vote, no other motion, just the gavel.

So you might wonder what would matter so much that the chairman would bend rules to change this bill and eliminate the ability for local communities to use a local option sales tax for property tax relief. If you think about all the ways that certain members of House Republican leadership have tried to stand in the way of local people’s ability to fund urgent local needs like public transportation, you realize it is likely that they recognize that property tax relief might be pretty popular use for a local sales tax, especially since communities in North Idaho already use local option for this purpose. It might even be popular enough that, when combined with a proposal to fund public transportation, it would easily pass by 2/3 majority, even in places like Star, Eagle and Canyon County. And well, even if it means eliminating a potential method of lowering property taxes, they seem to stop at nothing to stand in the way of this kind of progress. Light rail, street cars, a real bus system. Apparently, the last thing Rep. Moyle wants is having the local option legislation include anything that improves the chances that the Treasure Valley will ever use a 1/2 penny local sales tax to fund public transportation.

Brutal Day

The floor is empty. The pages have come up to try throwing paper airplanes from the balcony. We are all headed home now to lick wounds and tie up the last of it next week.

This morning I made my final visit to the Senate, looking for my 5th vote to advance S1323, the addition of gays and lesbians to the Human Rights act to protect us from discrimination in employment, housing and education. Finally today I give up and concede that we will pick this work up again next year. I can’t say dead. The bill is resting in a drawer until next year. We will be back. As many times as it takes– and really too many have said that some year they know the time will be right. But why do they wait while people live in fear of losing jobs? Why do they wait while so many are forced to pretend they are other than they are? Why do they wait when so many in here clearly agree this is something which will be done someday. When will all the fear within this body stop overtaking the sense of what is right?

There were other losses today. Democrats watched as we lost MaryLou Shepard’s vote (actually a typical thing to have happen) and gained only Leon Smith’s vote on fending off a useless constitutional amendment to restrict local people’s ability to use local option taxes for local needs. Personal Property taxes passed. International Education, carried by Tom Trail, who I think has drawn unimaginable derision from his own party, died on the floor.

I know how hard it is to be a Democrat but being a moderate Republican might just be harder in here and may produce lesser, more stressful results. It is the fear thing. Fear of your own party. Something about party allegiance, where, under this kind of conservative leadership, you might pay dearly for stepping out of the fold. We Democrats don’t bother MaryLou, but Tom Trail, Mark Snodgrass, Leon Smith and Carlos Bilbao have paid for representing their districts and may still be paying for who they voted for as speaker or how they voted on something or how they spoke out and objected to a process or a piece of legislation.

But that’s what is feeding the fear, all this tension, all these primaries, a year of fear of primaries. The filing closes in five minutes. Republicans are going at each other out there. We Democrats have some good candidates and good issues after this session. It all unfolds now, after this brutal day.

Noise Under the Surface

As hard as it has been to learn to sit still, sit quiet, I did that today. The single issue I’ve worked hardest to oppose, not just this year but for three years now, the total repeal of Personal Property Tax, just passed the 70 member House by 4 votes.
    Fred Wood and I (he had paired with Eric Anderson who was gone and so was prohibited from debating,) the two of us were on the phone counting votes, talking to swing votes and urging our Republican colleagues to debate with the Democrats.
    Being on the phone helped. It kept me busy. Not debating but working the floor from the phone meant I could stand up and ask Steve Thayne to call Tom Loertscher, ask Diane Thomas to make her points about counties, ask Maxine to get someone downstairs to debate against.
    There was a most unusual mix of people on both sides of this bill. Pete Nielsen said that those he often follows are split so he was wavering. In the end he voted Aye. Somehow we even lost JoAn Wood who debated so eloquently against the bill in committee. We gained a no vote from Tom Trail who was a co-sponsor. People like Lyn Luker swung and stood up with concern that the bill reads that in 2014, regardless of the economic situation, the whole $120 million is due and the whole business tax comes off and shifts to the sales tax. 
    My quiet was on the surface, on the screen and the microphone. I know I did all I could, everything I possibly could. It is now up to the Senate. The Idaho Association of Commerce and Industry won’t sleep until they get every vote tied down in shiny pro-industry barbed wire. May the counties and families and schools and future budget writers tread lightly but not rest until we get a bill to fix personal property tax that does not do the harm this one does.

Amending the Shift

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Rep Bill Killen and a group of us in the House just made an attempt to amend House Bill 599, a bill which shifts $120 million in business personal property taxes onto the sales tax. The Idaho Association of Commerce and Industry (IACI), the big industry lobby and the sponsors of 599 moved the bill to the amending order to fix constitutional concerns brought up by the Attorney General. We rushed to prepare and Rep. Killen submitted amendments to the Speaker to compete with theirs.
    After some debate about which amendment would go first, the drafts were passed out by pages onto to the desks of 70 members of the house. Which amendment goes first can matter because sometimes, once one amendment passes, the other is moot. For that reason our amendment went last. Our amendment gutted their bill and replaced it with a far more simple and more equitable $50,000 personal property tax exemption for all businesses. This would cost taxpayers only $9 million in sales tax dollars rather than $120 million and would benefit small businesses most since about 80% of businesses have less than $50,000 in personal property to be taxed.
    The procedure for Amendments is quite elaborate. Normally the floor session where the 70 of us vote on bills is run by the Speaker. To amend bills the floor session is dissolved and the Majority Caucus Chair, Rep Scott Bedke, takes the podium as Chairman of "The Committee of the Whole." Rep Killen addressed the Chairman and fielded questions from all over the floor with precision and poise. We debated the shift to taxpayers, the impact to the county’s ability to borrow and the lack of guarantee that the replacement moneys will be adequate to cover county services (from hospitals to needed fire, ambulance, schools and more.)
    In the end the Chaiman for our Committee of the Whole closed debate. Normally we make a voice vote on amendments which is not recorded. Someone requested "division" which means we vote instead by standing or sitting in response to "all those in favor" and "all those opposed." I had called JoAn Wood to ask her  to second Bill’s motion to amend (this is a formality where we have a second person listed on the sheet which looks like a regular bill. In this case it was a thick packet.Lenore Barrett argued that since the amendment was longer than the original bill, everyone should vote no. An amendment often has to be longer because it includes section that have been changed or language to be eliminated.)
    When we rose for division, only Diana Thomas from Emmett stood with the six of us Democrats on the balcony. I could see Leon Smith and Jim Marriot standing downstairs but most people are not visible from upstairs. I’m sure JoAn stood.
    It is amazing the power IACI has over this place some days. I would have said their power was waning when they changed their organization to represent only the biggest businesses in Idaho. They did a lot of work on this year’s bill but we have labored to to make sure that Idahoans see the cost of this legislation and who pays that cost. They can call it apple pie and economic development but in the end  it is just a $90 million give-away to some of the biggest industry in the state, much of which is publicly traded and will go to shareholders, not to employees through the kind of trickle down IACI insists will occur. Small businesses we know would invest those dollars in wages, benefits and local expenditures which might benefit families and the economy. That can be said of many who benefit most from IACI’s bill.
    The benefit to small business is fully granted by the $50,000 exemption amendment we proposed. And our amendment would not have carried with it the $90 million tax shift that comes if the bill is passes exactly as IACI wants it to.

Trusting Government

    My partner Carol’s favorite legislator has got to be Lenore Barrett. Carol, like some Idahoans, tunes in to the IPTV webcast of House floor debate every day and plays it in the back ground as she works. If the debate sounds interesting she might even watch the video for a bit. http://www.idahoptv.org/leglive/ She always tunes in when Lenore debates. I’ve long thought Lenore could be a champion slam poet. As a former slam poet myself and one who went to the Slam Nationals in Chicago with a team of other poets from Boise a few years back, I’d know. Slam poetry is performance poetry. Some people have a style of delivery that would make the phone book sound interesting. Others just have a way with words. Yet others have a way with metaphors that makes for outrageous content. Lenore is one of those. She is legendary for the wild images she evokes in floor debate and even in committee. She’ll pencil something down, leaning back in her seat, pursing her lips and contemplating the ceiling to find the next line or rhyme.
    Today’s debate in Rev and Tax was not particularly poetic but she did make a statement that spoke volumes about our state. Lynn Tominaga was presenting a bill on irrigation water and noted that some who opposed the bill simply don’t trust the city council to decide who should be exempted from the tax we were debating. He noted further that these people just didn’t seem to trust government.
    Lenore, with her usual flair raised her hand and the Chairman, sitting next to her, leaned back and let her speak.
    "I don’t trust government either, babe," she said with some gravity. And on raged the debate about who should pay the tax and when and who should be exempted.
    Now further disclosure is probably necessary at this point. I in fact grew up in Custer County in Lenore’s home district #35. It is the largest legislative district in the state. It encompasses several wilderness areas, miles ad miles of national forest, national recreation areas, bureau of land management lands and then too, little threads of habitation along rivers and canyon bottoms and farmed valleys between the mountains. It is the home of the anti-environment and anti-government militias of the late 80s. I grew up hearing heated discussion about government and its evils when we went to gas up at the Clayton Mercantile.
    I’ve got to say that from Clayton, Idaho government sure seems far away and abstract. It might just be embodied by a property tax tax notice or the IRS. It might be a law you don’t like or a cop that gives you a speeding ticket. But as with anything we don’t know personally, the animosities sure can grow when  you don’t goverment meet face to face.
    I think about government and my own relationship to it. I worked for the forest service for 7 years outside Challis, Lenore’s hometown. I embodied government to people who saw me inspecting their outfitter camps as an intrusion into a way of life and a business they had run the same way for decades long before the area was designated wilderness. I think of my feelings toward government as a gay person and how disenfranchised I’ve felt and how disrespected and unvalued I’ve felt as I faced the hostile laws and lack of appreciation for what it is like to belong to a group of people who are sometimes killed just for who we are. What kind of government would not care? Would not do all it could to keep young people from being beaten and fired from jobs when we work so hard and just want to be left to make a living and live our lives in peace.
    Lenore’s point was about taxes. I think it cuts to the heart of it as well as anything. Do we see government as being made up of people with values like ours? Is government a vast majority which sees us as an insignificant blip on a screen? Will it look out for our unique concerns or steam roll over us without a second thought?
    Maybe it is my job as a legislator to make sure to put a face on government. We as elected officials have to do more than wait for people to contact us to say when something is wrong. By that time I think the damage is often done. It is all of our job to ensure that government is in part made up of people from diverse backgrounds who set policy having walked in the shoes of more than just a privileged few. 
    We will all trust government better if we see it as made up of people like ourselves. Helen Chenoweth was not elected on a fluke. She and Lenore Barrett represent a part of Idaho that does see black helicopters in the rain clouds and can not begin to fathom why it takes so much tax money to sustain the infrastructure of protections, facilities, services, relief and communication required to cobble together a nation like ours. We all shudder at "trust us." If we picture a faceless government above our heads, it might all seem pretty foreign to us. We might still see its interests as alien and its intentions as potentially hostile.

Divide and Conquer

Not everything is digital in the House. Pages still post white numbers on a board to create the House Calendar each day. This is a pretty full board but yesterday’s was even more packed.

Rep. Liz Chavez from Lewiston at her desk on the floor.

Before the afternoon floor session the front row sets to work reading bills and answering e-mail.

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Quiet night on the floor now. We had a full calender and came back at 3 PM to do a second floor session for the day. We plowed through a lot of senate bills. Now I’m up on the balcony with fans rattling and Rep. Tom Loertcher out of sight on the phone below discussing how he feels he could pretty likely pass a bill through the house to do away with primary elections all together. "Get the government out of elections," he laughs. Sounds a little like get voters out of elections to me. But I’m biased. I like open primary elections and loved seeing all the Independents and Republicans at our Democratic caucuses this year.

Latest strategy from Committee Chairs is to hear controversial bills over two or three days. All the opposing testimony concentrated in the first day. Then all the supporting testimony (or the Chair’s preferred testimony) on the second day, right before the vote. The Business Personal Property Tax repeal today for example. Darfur Divestment in the Senate, testimony was split exactly like that.
    The Farm and Ranch protection act to save working lands from development was killed that way last week. Strong testimony from a woman who raises sheep in Canyon County the first day. Also eloquent words from a farmer from Swan Valley. He testified to the point I had tears running down my face. He talked about the loss of those working lands, the elk and bear and peasant and blowing wild grasses. His attachment to place. The dirt under his nails and his father leaving him the farm and its open beauty just as it was decades ago. What he has is now rare. Yet this land is still there, only because of the money provided by an easement he sold in promise that neither he nor any future owner would build subdivisions. It sits there in the open, below encroaching develop, off to one side as you cross the Snake River headed for the Tetons. This man spoke of his desire to see this land stay as it is until the caldera bursts open again and swallows the place. In perpetuity. We heard his testimony and then held the vote to the next day when republicans on the committee picked the bill apart and killed it.

Signals Crossed

In committee, when the vote is going to be close, we pass notes, make eye contact and try in any way we can to nail down any votes we may not have assured before committee started. Besides, after the testimony before a committee, you HOPE that legislators are listening and may be swayed one way or another by what the public has to say, if not by your brilliant debate or that of your even more brilliant colleagues.
    On votes past I’ve flashed a thumbs up and a shrug to Lenore Barrett; passed notes to Leon Smith or Mike Moyle; whispered to my democratic neighbors and counted debate, body language and anything I’ve got to work with to figure out if we have the votes for a motion or who should make the motion or even in which order the motions should be made.
    In Rev & Tax Committee this morning we had a royal break down of communication over strategies to kill what I think is a really bad bill. This bill touted itself as a growth pays for itself bill but really allowed real estate developers to place a hidden tax on homes in order to pay for roads, highway improvements, overpasses, sewer line extensions, fire houses and other city or county infrastructure that the subdivision developer might normally pay for through an impact fee. If local governments charge developers an impact fee to try to keep the cost of this new growth from shifting to existing homeowner’s property taxes, that impact fee would be included in the price of the home, easy for a home buyer to see. The bill we passed out of Rev & Tax today allowed the developer instead to hide the cost of all that city and county infrastructure in a special tax that would let the developer place a lien on the house and add more payments onto the other property taxes a homebuyer would have to pay each year.
    It is a really complex bill, full of technical issues which I’m sure we will be litigating for a decade if it passes this year. Rp Moyle and I have successfully seen it killed three years in a row now and I hope this year to be another year we protect Idaho homebuyers from this sort of developer slight of hand. Honestly anything that requires a consumer disclosure notice right in the bill is probably less than wholesome for homebuyers. Most people are not going to dream they need to look for these hidden taxes when they buy a home in a subdivision outside town.
    So what happened today? Well, we had a substitute motion (a second motion made by a committee member) to send the bill to the amending order and an "original motion" (the first motion) to "send the bill to the floor with a do pass recommendation." The motion to send the bill to the floor is the most common motion made in any committee in the statehouse. Very normal. Sending the bill to "general orders" or the amending order is less common. It usually means the bill needs a change of some kind and the whole 70 of us Representatives on the floor of the house will debate that change and vote on it.
    This bll sure needed changes. Unfortunately the amendment Rep. Jaquet proposed was pretty minor. It did partially address the sprawling leap frog development the bill would encourage but didn’t fix issues with 1) out of state developers voting to form or amend the district and raise the taxes, 2) issues with the bonding and debt or 3) issues with the disclosure notice not stating in big letters the words "special tax" or "lien" to warn homeowners in plain language about the house they were about to buy.
    So I messed up. I passed a note to Phil Hart whom I’d spoken with that morning about killing the bill. He tells me right as we enter committee that he’s voting for the amendment but doesn’t say why. I pass a note saying I think we can kill the amendment and the bill — hoping he won’t abandon me. He shrugs and smiles at me across the room. I take that to mean, OK try your strategy. Now mind you neither Wendy nor Mike Moyle has said anything to me about any stratgy around amendments. Wendy makes her substitute motion to amend the bill and debate flies. I debate against both the motion to send the bill to the floor and the one to amend it. We vote and by two votes the motion to amend fails. Next the motion to send the bill to the floor is voted on as Rep. JoAn Wood, who I was counting on to be a no, comes into committee late and pauses before she votes, visibly undecided before finally voting…… yes. The bill passes, headed to the floor where in  afew days the House will decide whether to pass it on to the Senate.
    Because I had encouraged Rep. Bill Killen who sits next to me (and is great on local government issues because he is a former Mayor and City Council member as well as an attorney) because I convinced him to vote no with me against both motions, the bill passed. No one had bothered to tell us about any strategy around amending the bill.
    Looking around the room I figured it was one of those days when word had come down from somewhere high in the Republican hierarchy saying this bill must pass and if ammended, we’ve gotten you to agree to vote yes… and so Rep. Moyle and Rep. Hart had caved in and voted to amend the bill. I should have more faith but I don’t. That stuff happens all the time. Rep. Jaquet had been seeming like she was with Rep. Ructi who was supporting the bill and she never leaned a few inches my way to explain the plan….
    All along, while I battled to get votes NOT to send the bill to the amending order I guess that Rep. Moyle was hoping to send the bill to the amending order to kill it by attaching many, many amendments until it went down under its own weight in a sea of hot, confused debate. I believe Rep. Jaquet was part of the plan. Maybe not. I know Phil Hart was but he never sent back a note say "NO! Vote yes on the amendment! We will kill the bill on the amending order!"
    Note to my colleagues in diverse bipartisan coalitions designed to kill bills we agree are bad: If there is a plan, share it!

Ticking Clock

The session is ticking. The clock on the wall above the Speaker’s head whispers the two Latin words we simultaneously dread and welcome: "sine die." End of session. End of chances to get our bills heard. Time when all rushes, rules fly out the windows, heat on, tempers hot, phones ringing.
    Now we all just feel it coming. Out of committees onto the overflowing calendar suddenly flow the toughest, most controversial proposals. These are not partisan bills necessarily but those which divide parties and constituencies and interests, divide communities, professions, classes and families.
How to tax.
Who to tax.
Who not to tax.
Who to license.
Who to regulate.
How much to regulate.
How much to pollute.
How much to prevent.
How to manage the many crises we’ve let accumulate.
And all this in the context of elections. Some live in fear, asking, "What could they say about me with this vote?" Some try to fit votes into frames of values and principles. Some don’t even try, especially now. Some pull out calculators. Some go with gut. Some count calls and letters. Some call home.
The printer on the second floor shovels out paper, printing out vote tallies destined for use in elections. And it all spins on faster and faster rolling downhill now toward the end.

Hide Nor Hair

Normally by this time in the year I would have seen the governor’s "people" quite a lot. I’d also have had presentations and discussions about his legislation, in caucus, in the hall, in committee. Someone would have brought around a colorful stack of colored graphs showing rosy projections for debt service and dead certain future federal highway funds for GARVEE bonding, causing me to explain one more time that I am a continuing to be a no vote there. 
    Maybe the Governor being under the weather is part of it. Maybe he can get it all done without Democratic votes. Maybe being in the balcony means out of site out of mind. Maybe I don’t know what the Governor’s people look like this year. Maybe the governor is saving it all for the last week before we are supposed to adjourn so that there’s extra pressure to push his stuff through or else plane reservations will be missed, taxpayer dollars will flow for extra days of session and he’ll have a stack of our bills as bargaining chips on his desk.
     So as of now the most notable executive office legislation in my mind is the Governor’s wacky idea about creating across the board $150 vehicle registration fees for every car in the state. That represents an interesting set of values. Even people who have a car that only half of the time even works will pay the same $150 that the owner of a Hum Vee will pay. Let’s see, if a person buys even a whopping 3 gallons of gas each day, 365 days a year, that’s 1,095 gallons. Even a hefty 5 cent per gallon increase in gas tax will only equal $54.75 a year in gas taxes paid per driver. But the governor says he won’t raise gas taxes.
    Of additional concern is that Republican leaders on Rev & Tax refuse to allow for local option sales taxes to be an option for local communities who want to pay for their roads and public transit that way. So might we be creating our own roads disaster here? Creating eternally more need for widening roads in urban Treasure Valley because no alternative to driving really exists. Rural projects pale in the shadow of the magnitude of the traffic snarls we are creating here. My guess is that some rural folks would like us to raise our own taxes to take care of our mess so something would be left in State budgets to fix their roads.
    No, Governor Otter wants a flat $150 registration fee as a strategy to solve our roads problems. Not something like the tiered fee which now accounts for the newness of your car and thus likely accounts a bit for your ability to pay. It does make me wonder a little about Otter’s priorities and values. Some people’s cars are barely worth that much. The governor is lacking nexus in his proposal. Not all cars impact roads equally and not all people can afford $150 each year. I’m sure, with time, the Governor’s people will come to us about this. I’m looking forward to it because I have lots of questions.

Digital Lawmaking

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In the Idaho House of Representatives, 70 of us sit today on the floor of our two story house chambers where we have our lap tops open and screens lit in front of us. You can hear keys tapping and chairs squeaking in the moments between the speaker’s low rote progression through the calendar and procedures of the floor session.
    Set in curving rows downstairs and two long, unbroken rows upstairs, we review the legislation we are to vote on by going to the state website where the bills are kept in electronic form. http://www.legislature.idaho.gov/sessioninfo/hcal.htm   Our voting pad pops up on the desk top when debate is done and it is time to vote. In the old statehouse we had a set of buttons on our desk, a green one for yes and a red one for no. A bell still rings when a vote is called but it is an electronic replication of the old ear splitting metal one in the Capitol building house chambers. At the start of the session this year we had to listen to the many ring tones the staff tested to try to replicate that metal on metal sound.
    While we sit on the floor with the bills on the screen before us and access to all of Idaho code, every law, statute and act right there before us as well, http://www3.state.id.us/idstat/TOC/idstTOC.html we might have an instant message window open on our computer and be chatting with someone else on the floor below us or be using our cell phones to text family about our schedule or where we left the truck keys.
    In preparation for debate we can visit a web site to help us calculate a lethal dose of arsenic for a bill on water quality standards. When we rise to present a bill, those on the floor below us see us by looking at a TV screen set in the high corners of the room near the ceiling.
    It is like we are in many places at once now, like light bends and physical space gets compressed into a black-hole-like space inside this plastic box with plastic buttons which now contains worlds of knowledge and the ability to impact people far, far away in the time light takes to travel. It can be surreal. In a month we will all be home pulling weeds and in many cases standing on ground far from a computer screen. Still, there in our pocket, as the wind blows and the sky turns, a cell phone might ring and in a second we are here again, talking to the Speaker about a bill or agreeing to a schedule for a committee meeting. Lawmaking continues now digitally beyond the reaches of the statehouse. We send digital drafts to agencies, even view revisions on a hand held phone while the dry grass waves and the earth thaws pushing up green into spring.

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Words to Avoid

There are words one might want to avoid when one comes to the legislature to testify in favor of a bill. Of course if you want to kill a bill you might want to use these words liberally, while sounding appropriately conservative.

    CASINOS. This morning, presentation of a bill was proceeding nicely until a Senate sponsor mentioned how this particular bill would appeal to Casinos. Let’s just say that a Democrat last year was able to kill an appropriations bill for the Idaho State Lottery Commission because children were pictured on the Lottery annual report materials apparently exploiting children for the sake of gambling. Suffice to say, we are not a pro gambling body.
    COMMUNISTS or SOCIALISTS: It is probably not good to mention any avowed socialists who are co-sponsors or to mention Communist countries with programs upon which your bill is modeled.
    WOLVES: It would be unwise to say that your bill benefits wolves, even if it remotely might do so.
    CAMELS: This just makes people think of the proverbial camel’s nose under the tent. Slippery slope and, as Lenore Barrett mentioned in response to a claim that a bill took "baby steps" toward a certain goal: "Baby steps? What happens though when this infant really starts to walk?"
    ATTORNEYS: While the last election added many attorneys to our ranks, some of them like Ruchti and Luker being most fine upstanding citizens, it is likely unwise to laud how your bill benefits any group of attorneys or any individual attorney (unless it is Perry Mason.)
    ENDANGERED SPECIES: I wouldn’t try getting overly scientific mentioning species of any kind, especially not endangered ones, no matter how cute and fluffy (or long pink and slimy) they are. (Well actually the endangered Moscow giant earthworm is white and slimy. Rep. Shirley Ringo says it is quite docile.) But you get the point. We tend to be suspicious of the motivations of scientists. No species.

Fighting Words

Debating Dog Fighting. Donna Boe brought a bill two years ago and it was killed in the Jud & Rules committee on a party line vote. This year the Chair of Jud & Rules wouldn’t even let Donna Boe be the lead floor sponsor or let her be listed as a co-floor sponsor on Senator Brad Little’s bill. Floor sponsors are people who are assigned to present an agency or senate bill on the floor of the House for passage by our whole body of 70 members. I was assigned to floor sponsor a bill to adopt the Federal Tax Code (it actually slightly lowers state taxes) this year and will be presenting another exciting bill to adopt uniform mediation policy for attorneys in the state. I try to pick and choose what I floor sponsor. None of us is typically assigned to carry a piece of legislation we hate. Though it can be funny when that happens. Carrying a bill which was controversial in committee usually falls to the person who made the most debate in favor of it, or if the Chairman likes the bill, to the person who seems to have the best chance of getting it passed on the floor.
    The dog fighting bill just passed unanimously with Rep Harwood saying he was holding his nose while clicking his mouse on the green YES button on his computer screen because the bill says dog fighting could carry a five year prison term —  not because he wants people to train dogs to tear each other apart of course. We’ve come that far. Pete Neilsen in committee actually relayed a story about when he was a boy and how it was typical that he might urge his dog to fight another boy’s dog when they passed in the street. He was very concerned as to whether this bill would mean he would have gone to prison for that. The Prosecutors said it all rests in the word "organized" and how much anyone would agree he organized those fights. In committee Pete tells quite the stories of his boyhood. I know we all measure the law to our experience, but some do it more verbally than others. Pete must have been a wild one. Now he is renowned for outlandish questions which themselves tend to be ten times longer (and more slowly and dramatically delivered) than the answers.
    Jud & Rules is my next committee this afternoon. It is tense just now because our chair is in a less than happy mood. He told Rep. Labrador, Rep. Luker & Rep. Hart and I that we need to get an AG’s opinion, need to have the Courts, Department of Corrections, and the Commission on Pardons and Parole willing to state support before we will even get a hearing on our alternative sentencing bill.
    So far we’ve got 5 of the committee’s 16 members signed on a co-sponsors and many more expressing interest in seeing the bill pass. That’s one of the powers of a chairman. You can hold bills in your "drawer" and never give them a hearing if you want. I suppose that is particularly appealing when you think there might be the votes in your committee to pass something you don’t like.

Pages and Hair

Unless you’ve been to the statehouse or our temporary quarters while we are in session, you might not know about Pages. I admit I don’t know that much about pages, except that there are quite a lot of them, that they seem to have a sense of humor and that they keep the legislature from existing as this insulated club of 105 mostly older men, and some women, with little or no connection to the generation now contemplating first dates, acne, college applications and a world attached to little or no experiential limitations.
    Sure some legislators are grandparents, a few are parents with kids this age or younger, a few of us are teachers, but it’s a very few. Yet we spend all day, five days a week with the equivalent of a high school graduating class, from an average sized rural high school in our midst, studying us, learning  the rules, the procedures and personal politics from very, very close quarters. I confess at first, it is a bit easier not to notice them, particularly in the balcony where we are somewhat out of the way on our two dead end rows perched above the main floor. Eventually they make their impression, they say hi, they ask questions, make a joke or hang there just outside the debate.
    Practically speaking, day to day, pages staff our committees, retrieve code books, pass notes for us, they run errands, make copies, fold letters, and congregate in a little room off the House Lounge near the snack area. Of course these are not just any high school seniors or juniors. They hale from particular towns around Idaho and tend to have last names like Lake, Andrus or Moyle, names that reveal their lineage and ties to the committee chairs and sheep-rancher-legislators they are the children and grand children of.
    Dan Popkey noted two years ago how the pages, if they had been the ones to determine the fate of the constitutional amendment banning gay marriage (and civil unions and anything remotely similar), that this younger generation would have rejected the amendment quite soundly. Listening to their conversations this year you see them thoughtful and playful, exploring what party affiliation they feel fits, what hair styles they might enjoy and what law makers they might emulate or avoid.
    If you watch the floor session from public television or the internet, something I find hard to recommend until the session gets into full swing and we are actually beginning to debate legislation (as we likely will next week,) you might have noted on Friday that one of the pages on stage during the prayer had her hair in a pretty vigorously teased "do." The speaker called it a beaufont. Given that I am actually one of the now growing handful of gen xers in the legislature, I was not alive in the era of the beaufont, so probably can’t well judge how beaufont the hair was. What I do know is that chairman Dennis Lake’s grand daughter and page for the House Revenue and Taxation Committee has one fabulous, wild, gutsy hair-do. We’ll call it a horizontal beaufont. Kind of a giant, blond, back of the head, eye lash. All the female pages I understand on Friday were trying to apply enough hair product and combing techniques to achieve this level of hair. The Speaker took it well. It was much needed levity in a long somber week.
    As for the pages, they are here until half way through the session when they return to high school and a new batch arrives on the House floor. I suspect they see a lot more than we think. If past groups of pages are any indication, there are thinkers, scientists, writers, activists and governors among them. It will be a surreal transition for them I’m sure, from immersion in politics and issues in a stuffy, adult-centered environment, to home and school again. All the secrets of the House will spin off to far parts of the state with them. For now they are here, perfectly capable of judging us, our integrity and actions, hovering, hair flying, just behind us here, but ever so slightly invisible in the legislative process. 

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Access

The Closet the Media is Assigned to

Reporter on the Floor

Lobbyist in the Balcony

"Back Benchers" share a light moment in the back row of the balcony where the media now must be escorted to enter
……

Access to the statehouse and to lawmakers is an issue this session. Normally the House floor might welcome a line of print reporters, photographers and TV cameras. Writers would sit in a neighboring legislator’s chair while asking questions in the afternoon or early morning. This year new signs are appearing on doorways to the floor limiting access to the upper and lower house not just for lobbyists but for the media as well.
    While i admit I didn’t want to have lobbyists filing in unannounced or TV cameras set up to surprise me when something was breaking and I had no time to think, I am concerned we have now restricted access to legislators generally. We operate in a tight space where, since all but a leadership and committee chairs have no desk or office but the spot we chose on the floor, we have little alternative but to spend most our time behind what are now closed doors.
    It is enough of a problem that Republican Caucuses are closed to the media and public. Democratic Caucuses are and always have been open, but now the media is hard pressed to find us when they have questions since they can not even see the balcony seats from a window to know when we are there.
    Access by lobbyists concerns me less since nearly all green tagged and registered lobbyists are paid and spend the whole day in the statehouse where they have far more access to us than the public.Reporters on the other hand often operate on deadline and are frequently the only access that people in some parts of the state will have to the law makers who represent them.
    While it might not be pleasant to be surprised by a bank of TV cameras, it is our obligation to respond when we are held accountable for a vote or asked to  react to an event that our constituents’ lives are affected by. I know no reporter who will not respect a request to give us a minute to collect or thoughts, find more information or otherwise prepare before we respond.
    It is curious to me that the issue of media access first came up on the balcony where I have noted that all the freshmen lawmakers sit. Kren, Crane, Bowers and Thane are all in the back row far from leadership and the Republican Party’s media handler. I imagine that to have an entire row freshmen legislators unsupervised and unspun far from watchful eyes might make some  in the party nervous. That row has established itself as a jovial entity: "The Back benchers." They hung a banner on the back wall of the house chambers over their heads this week until the speaker asked them to take it down.

Visiting the Senate

Today is a day to visit the senate. What used to be a longer walk around the glaring white marble of the rotunda, is a short walk between the brown granite and pioneer murals. Still I understand that Senators don’t visit the House that often these days. You don’t see them in our halls.
    The Senate has 35 members. We have 70. It might be said that they have a tad more experience since many served here before being elected to the Senate. I do not believe any current House members served in the Senate. The Senate is certainly more balanced in idealogy with both moderates and conservatives in Majority Republican leadership. Here now our Republican leadership in the House is all very conservative. It has created tensions and interesting dynamics with the Senate and occasionally with the Governor’s office.
    I consider it a rite of passage to have long ago first been grilled by certain members of Senate leadership. It is something which, when I was a citizen visiting the legislature, intimidated and frightened me. As a lobbyist in 2004, working on health care, consumer protection and poverty issues, those visits, though few, were a necessary trail. The longer the conversation or grilling lasted, the better off I knew I was. If silence fell too early in the conversation or you took "no" for an answer, you knew your bill was toast or you knew that the bill you were trying to kill was going to pass.
    Today those long, intense, demanding conversations are some of the more intellectually stimulating and important discussions I have. They are an essential, powerful part of the legislative process.  They let us test ideas and legislation, develop arguments, face potential opposition and humble ourselves.
    I lean back here in my big black chair on the floor of the House and know that this is an odd, foreign world, the legislature. Perhaps the realm of trial law comes close, yet not, because there is more chaos here, far more wonderfully random reminders of the complexities of the world. We are not trained for this. The 105 of us are elected. These are the early days of this year’s bills, the point at which they are still organic and slightly fluid. The lives and experiences of real people start to turn into words on paper now, and to keep that text connected to those who will be impacted takes no small amount of will. The potential to turn policy into a game of political expedience is always there. Always to be tested. I hope always to be resisted.

Never Left

So I didn’t go home. This happens a lot. The fans whirrr. The sound of the keys echoes. I remember how foreign the formality of this place was at first. Nothing in my life prepared me for all the woodwork, the gold leaf, the orders of business and the structured discourse. We are farmers, ranchers, insurance agents, retired business people, teachers and sometimes ordinary working people. When you first arrive, this place can not help but instill awe.
    Trying to dress in the clothes this building requires is only one part of it. It is a lesson in class which I think those of us from rural places never got. Two earrings, not one. Shoes with heels, the tie for men, jackets for all of us, all the trappings of gender especially. And then there is the hand shaking. I’d never done that before I worked with the legislature. On doors when I ran for office, I learned to reach out and look someone in the eye. It was good. That making flesh to flesh contact that says I am not an image on a TV screen.
    The formality here forces us into civility perhaps. Maybe it is best we do not get too comfortable. In this place we have a very specific task. We are here to do the business of the people of Idaho, not our own business. The formality and foreignness is a reminder, minute to minute that we don’t own this, we visit by the graces of those who elect us. This place is other worldly for me in a wonderful way. I leave here and walk past neighbors and constituents longing for my black jeans and single earing. But that will wait. We have at least three months of law making ahead of us.
    Not in Kansas anymore. We pray, pledge allegiance, stand and sit at the gavel. We ask permission to speak and address each other as good lady or good gentleman.

Ready or Not

I remember: What we as legislators write and pass into law, we
sentence Idahoans to live with (or without) daily until others repeal
our folly or the courts strike it down. I ask, every day of the
session, may we think carefully where all the burdens fall.

19 out of 70

Big frames in the halls of the House and Senate hold photos of law makers since the legislature began. All but the most recent of those photos are in storage. In last year’s photo, (I’m the dork who wore neon green on picture day) mine is one of 19 Democrat’s faces in a very, very Republican sea of eyes. Of course looking at the photos you can’t tell us apart.
    For a decade before I was elected, I was a volunteer for non-profit organizations. I talked to legislators about human rights, tax policy, health care, consumer protection and gay and lesbian issues. Hard issues. I rarely saw anything I worked for get printed by a committee, much less passed into law.
    In my 30s I spent a lot of time angry with law makers who disagreed with me on the issues that affected my life. The year before I ran for the legislature, Jerry Sweet, one of the most anti-gay law makers in the statehouse became one of my best allies on a health care bill I was working to pass for the Idaho Community Action Network.
    It hit me there under the photos outside the Senate Local Government Committee how we humans are pretty multi-faceted. To make it all work we have to remember what we agree on and have in common. We can’t take each other’s stands on legislation personally. With one or maybe two exceptions I genuinely believe that each one of my colleagues is a good person trying to do what’s best for their constituents within the framework of beliefs that they hold. We may debate heatedly on an issue one minute but the next minute on the floor we might have to be allies on a different bill — one which won’t pass without us working together.
    Politics are not as simple as Democrat and Republican or conservative and progressive. Over the past few years Lenore Barrett and I occasionally voted together against the Rev & Tax committee on small business issues. That was a beautiful thing. …and it works because we know not to spend time dwelling on how we feel about wolves or whether people should own automatic rifles.

Before It Begins