Those of you who have been following the passage of the farm bill through the United States Congress are probably aware that there was a snafu involving a missing title to the bill — as I understand it (and I’m a little hazy on the details here) the House enrollment clerk sent 14 titles to the President instead of the 15 that had been passed. The President vetoed the bill with 14 titles, then the House voted to override the veto by passing a bill with 15 titles as intended. In any case, there was a clerical error that caused a potentially substantial defect in the legislation.
Brian Weberg at The Thicket points out something that occurred to me when I first heard of the situation. Somewhere there is one or more extremely unhappy and unpopular legislative staff members. With a bill of this magnitude, I just cringed at the thought of the person who made the mistake. With such jobs, there is no real glory — the only potential for getting noticed is negative. If legislative staffers are doing their job correctly, especially with respect to processing the legislation, they are practically invisible.
My particular major screw up along those lines didn’t end up amounting to much, but it was embarrassing. I can’t remember exactly what the legislation did, but it was a telecommunications bill of some importance being heard by Indiana’s Senate Commerce Committee. One of the main senator’s aides kept coming back with changes they needed to the draft version of the bill in bits and pieces. I thought we’d had it all squared away, and, in fact, had made my way to the committee room to sit in on the hearing. I was summoned back to my office for yet another change with about 5 minutes to go before the committee hearing. Somewhere in the rush, a “Ctrl-B” become a “Ctrl-V” and I inadvertently pasted a block of text into the draft. I thought I’d cleaned the document up, but I had not. The draft was printed and distributed to committee members. The garbled text was noticed, and that caused interested parties to lose confidence in the rest of the draft — probably 30 pages or so — and they had to postpone the hearing.
That was a bad day for me. But, it pales to nothing compared to the poor soul who screwed up the farm bill. My sympathies go out to that person.
Later in my tenure at Legislative Services, someone made up a joke that came to describe my philosophy about legislators and lobbyists who wanted unrealistically quick turn around times on their revisions: “If you want it bad, that’s how we’ll give it to you.” The key was to set deadlines for revisions and stick to them. To some extent, LSA depended heavily on the General Assembly’s leadership to enforce these things. Saying “no” to members of the General Assembly wasn’t something we felt free to do ourselves — and that was true of myself in particular, being only two or three years out of law school at the time.
The good thing for you, Doug, is that nobody remembers, but you. But, thanks for the reminder.
As far as ignoring deadlines and such, you can find self-important people anywhere, not just in the legislature. Rules don’t apply to them, because of their (self) importance in the total scheme of things. For some reason, one just tends to find a higher percentage of them in certain endeavors (like politics).