The Indiana General Assembly’s Organization Day will take place on Tuesday, November 18, 2008. From the outside, this always looked a lot like the first day of school when everyone is happy to see everyone else after summer vacation. Nothing substantive or controversial typically happens on organization day. The General Assembly just convenes to implement some of the (as the name would imply) organizational framework that will be used when they get together for real business soon after the first of the year. The session begins in earnest on January 6, 2009.
As I’ve mentioned, my old job was at the Legislative Services Agency. Now is about the time bill requests from legislators start coming in more quickly. Things may have changed since 1999, but back then, the legislator would typically meet with the director of LSA or of its bill drafting office, saying “I want a bill that does x, y, and z.” That request then typically gets assigned to a drafter/attorney, usually one who does a fair amount of work in the area of the request. (I believe the request also gets assigned to a fiscal analyst who prepares a fiscal impact statement — I was one of the bill drafting attorneys, not a fiscal analyst, so I don’t know as much about how their side of things work(ed).)
Often times, the request was dead simple or even an identical rehash of a bill that had been created in previous years. In those cases, you could just gin up the bill without having to get more details from the legislator. Other times there were unanticipated wrinkles or ambiguities with the request where you’d have to get further input from the legislator about his or her policy preferences. Still other times, the legislator would indicate that the drafter should talk to a particular constituent or lobbyist for further input on how the bill should look.
Bill requests were typically in full roar by the first of December — occasionally, I heard stories about legislators swinging by the State House to drop off their bill requests on their way to somewhere warm for Christmas Vacation. Those stories always warmed you up as a drafter who had to cut any holiday plans short to deal with the crush of legislation that had to be drafted by the first part of January. There are things I miss about drafting legislation. The 12 hour days around the holidays are not any of them.
Thanks for the info on the process.