Maureen Hayden on LSA

Good to see the Legislative Services Agency getting some love. (H/t Indiana Law Blog). LSA is the non-partisan agency that provides support to the Indiana General Assembly. Among other things, the staff attorneys draft legislation and the fiscal analysts provide analyses of the fiscal impact of legislation.

As Maureen Hayden’s article notes, the hours can be challenging – particularly around the holidays. It was not atypical for a legislator to drop off a bunch of bill requests on his or her way out of town for Christmas vacation so the requests would be ready for the beginning of session at the beginning of January. During the session, late nights and weekend work were not uncommon. One of the things that was most frustrating to me was, during session, Friday mornings were often slow. The House and Senate would adjourn on Thursday and not come back until Monday morning. So, you would have a slow Friday morning then, at 3 pm, you’d get a call from a lobbyist saying that Representative X told him to get in touch with you to have a proposed amendment ready for Monday morning. The ebb and flow of negotiations would manifest in bill and amendment requests at odd hours with quick turn around times and frequent last minute edits.

Occasionally a legislator asks you if you think whatever the proposal might be is a good idea. But, mostly they don’t; and that’s not really your role as a member of LSA. The snarky tone you see on this blog from time to time is probably a fair reflection of the behind closed door grousing you’d hear from time to time among LSA staffers. But it was studiously equal opportunity — you didn’t burden the legislators with those opinions; and you tried to produce a good product regardless of how flawed you thought the underlying policy goals might be.

It was probably those years of bottling up my opinion that made me so eager to share them here. Also, just an aside, but I wonder if it’s just coincidence that two of the longest running blogs about Indiana law/policy/politics (my own and the Indiana Law Blog) come from people with LSA backgrounds.