Citizen Lobbying

Tomorrow is the day legislators take their oaths of office, and then the biannual legislative session can get underway here in Texas. It seems early to me. I was aiming to think about that later in the month. But I’ve gotten underway.

I was asked to speak at our local Tea Party meeting this past Saturday on how to do citizen lobbying, and specifically how to follow bills during the legislative session. So I thought maybe I’d share some of that here. Even though the specifics apply to us here in Texas, the ideas can be true anywhere.

There are essentially four ways citizens can participate in government:

·         Voting

·         Political parties

·         Campaigning

·         Legislative lobbying

If you’re reading this, chances are you’ve been voting ever since you had the chance. Another step up is to participate with a party—by voting in a primary, attending a precinct meeting (usually on the day of a primary election, held afterward), becoming a delegate at a convention, or maybe even becoming a precinct chair. I’ve done all these. Campaigning is fairly new to me. But you may have done that if you knew a good candidate, or if you got inspired by one. Maybe you’ve just put out yard signs, or put a bumper sticker on your car; that’s part of campaigning.

Today we’ll mostly talk about lobbying our representatives. Lobbying simply means seeking to influence or persuade. You’re entitled to do that with your elected officials; they represent you, and they can only do that effectively if they know what your views are.

Citizen lobbying is different from paid lobbying. You don’t have to do any reporting to government about what you do. You’re just doing your civic duty by expressing your opinions to your elected lawmakers.

As they say, “When the legislature is in session, your freedoms are at risk.” You’d better let them know you’re watching, and you have certain expectations of them.

Even though it’s your right—and obligation—not everybody does it. There’s sort of a formula for figuring out how many constituents hold a view, based on how many express their opinion. It used to be that a letter had a greater impact than a phonecall, but after the powdered poison in the mail scare of the early 2000s, they’d prefer something other than a letter, although you’re still entitled to send one. Anyway, a letter, phonecall, or email is estimated to represent somewhere between four and ten constituents with that opinion.

If you do a phone, email, or letter contact, you’ll want it to be brief and focused:

·         Cover a single specific issue (with bill number, if there is one).

·         Make a specific request (support this bill or issue, oppose this bill, amend this bill).

·         Give 1-3 brief, clear reasons supporting your opinion.

Your request and opinion will be logged in a system and counted, so the elected official will have it as a reference.

There’s one more way to make contact, and that’s what we’re mostly talking about today: an in-person visit.

An in-person visit represents about a hundred constituents with that opinion. If you are willing to show up at your legislator’s office, he’s going to assume you take the issue seriously. And if you feel that strongly about it, so will many others who didn’t have the time or resources to make the trip to the legislator’s office.

There’s going to be an office at the capitol, and also in the local area. That’s true for US Congressman and Senators as well as for state representatives and senators (or whatever those positions are in your state). A capitol visit is bolder—and therefore maybe more persuasive—than a local office visit. But if you can’t make that trip, the local office visit still has about a ten-fold impact over an email. Also, you can visit about just a single issue, or about multiple bills or issues at the same time, since it’s obvious you’ll want to make the most of your time during the visit.

About four legislative sessions ago (Texas legislature is in session for about half a year every odd year), I was talking at a Tea Party meeting about contacting legislators with your opinions, mostly referring to what to do if you visit the capitol. And someone said, “But couldn’t we visit their local offices?” And then somehow I got assigned to set up those visits, and have a bill list we were following. And I’ve been the de facto legislative liaison for our Tea Party group ever since.

I was surprised that interest in these visits is even bigger this year than in the past. I feel anxious to do my part well. So far I’ve listed what I think will be our legislative priorities—based on what we’ve worked for in the past, and what we settled on last year at the district and state conventions. Platforms are a good source of possible legislation, which is why they tend to be longer and more detailed than most of us would prefer. But legislators do actually refer to them.

We’ve had a couple of innovations in the Republican Party of Texas. One is that we hold an up or down vote on each plank of the platform. (After discussion and acceptance of the platform language, we fill out a scantron sheet saying yes or no to each plank. Pretty much no plank gets removed at this point, but you can see varied strength of support.) We’ve done this for two conventions now.

This year another innovation was to organize the platform according to the state senate committees, making it easier to identify legislative possibilities. Also, we had a new committee for Legislative Priorities. They went through the platform and the ideas from the various local conventions around the state, and then determined what they thought were the top priorities for the upcoming legislative session, which the whole body at the convention discussed and approved. So we’ve got those to go by as well.

I’m looking at the priorities, and then identifying bill numbers. Many bills have already been filed, but it’s a matter of identifying the ones we think will do the job we hope for—or are at least a good starting point from which amendments can be added. So I’m building our bill list.

I expect to start scheduling visits with legislative offices by late January or early February. And then we’ll be making a visit about every other week. For most of those we’ll meet with the local staffer, rather than the legislator. But occasionally a legislator will be in town. Even visits to the capitol, unless you’ve made a specific appointment, you will probably meet with staffers rather than legislators.

Staffers are trained to take note of what we say, and our reasons, and put the information into the system. They do not, as a rule, express the representative’s opinion—unless that opinion is widely known and very clear, such as if the representative authored the bill. So don’t expect agreement when you make your visit. But that also means, if they’re not of your party or not in agreement with you, they will still listen respectfully and log your views.

Here in Texas we have a pretty good online system for tracking bills, and for finding other information about the legislators and legislative session. So, at our Tea Party meeting on Saturday I shared some of that.

The Texas Legislature Online home page.
Notice the My TLO tab, for following your bill list.

You can go to the Texas Legislature Online (https://capitol.texas.gov/) and set up an account (My TLO), and then set up bill lists and alerts, so you can follow the bills you’re interested in throughout the session. That means you can know when a bill is moving, or when a committee is hearing testimony on a bill, or when a vote has been taken and how that turned out.

You can follow a bill through all the stages—which includes several stages in the House or Senate, wherever it originated, followed by similar stages in the other house when it gets there, and then sometimes reconciliation when changes were made in the second house. The final stage is the governor’s signature.

Most bills die somewhere along the way. (Watch Schoolhouse Rock’s “I’m Just a Bill” for a refresher on that.) Last session there were a few of the bills we watched that made it through. Many more didn’t, so we’ll be working on those issues again this session. We have better leadership in the House this session, so that could help, although the majorities are smaller.

The point is, there is something you as a citizen can do to make a difference. I’m just a regular citizen. Any knowledge I have is just what I’ve gotten along the way, by giving it a try and learning as I go.

A citizen has a role to play in the government. A subject does not. I much prefer being a citizen, rather than a subject. That’s why I do what I do.

This has been a "how to" informational post. Another day (or several separate days) I may cover what the actual issues are this legislative session.

A Schoolhouse Rock Style Civics Lesson

Senator Ben Sasse gave the country a nice civics lesson last week, as his opening statement at the Judge Kavanaugh confirmation hearing for Supreme Court Justice.

Senator Ben Sasse, opening remarks
at the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings
screen shot from C-SPAN3

First, he made it clear that the hysteria surrounding a well-qualified judge with bipartisan support among his colleagues has nothing to do with Brett Kavanaugh. It has to do with a misunderstanding of—and a corruption of—the balance of power laid out in our Constitution.

This is not something new. He says,

These confirmation hearings haven’t worked for 31 years in America. People are going to pretend that Americans have no historical memory, and supposedly there haven’t been screaming protestors saying women are going to die at every hearing for decades. But this has been happening since Robert Bork. This is a 31-year tradition. There’s nothing new the last 18 months.

It's ideological, and it’s political. And unfortunately it's treated like team sports:

Our political commentary talks about the Supreme Court like they’re people wearing red and blue jerseys. That’s a really dangerous thing.

He suggests that a better use of these hearings would be to do some Schoolhouse Rock civics lessons for our kids, to give them the opportunity to understand our government better:

We should be talking about how a bill becomes a law, and what the job of Article II is, and what the job of Article III is. So let’s try just a little bit. How did we get here? And how do we fix it?

And then he spends a little time going over some constitutional basics.

The Constitution’s drafters began with the legislature. These are equal branches, but Article I comes first for a reason. And that’s because policymaking is supposed to be done in the body that makes laws. That means that this is supposed to be the institution dedicated to political fights.

If we see lots and lots of protests in front of the Supreme Court, that’s a pretty good litmus test barometer that our republic isn’t healthy. Because people shouldn’t be thinking of protesting in front of the Supreme Court; they should be protesting in front of this body.

The problem is that Congress (he refers to the legislative body using the general term Congress, comprised of the House and the Senate) has abdicated its responsibilities. The founders believed that the desire for power—generally a bad human trait, but nevertheless part of human nature—could be harnessed to have three separate but equal branches of government all jealously maintaining their power from overreach by the other branches. The founders would be surprised to see what has actually happened.

Here’s his description:

How did we get to a place where the legislature decided to give away its power? We’ve been doing it for a long time, over the course of the last century, but especially since the 1930s, and then ramping up since the 1960s—a whole lot of the responsibility in this body has been kicked to a bunch of alphabet soup bureaucracies. All the acronyms that people know about their government, or don’t know about their government, are the places where most actual policymaking—kind of in a way, lawmaking—is happening right now.

This is not what Schoolhouse Rock says. There’s no verse of Schoolhouse Rock that says “give a whole bunch of power to the alphabet soup agencies, and let them decide what the governance decisions should be for the people”—because the people don’t have any way to fire the bureaucrats.

And so, what we mostly do around this body is not pass laws. What we mostly do is decide to give permission to the secretary or the administrator of bureaucracy X, Y, or Z to make law-like regulations. That’s mostly what we do here. We go home, and we pretend that we make laws. No, we don’t. We make giant pieces of legislation, 1200 pages, 1500 pages long, that people haven’t read, filled with all these terms that are undefined. And we say, the secretary of such and such shall promulgate rules that do the rest of our dang jobs.

from Schoolhouse Rock video
Three Ring Government

That’s why there are so many fights about the executive branch, and about the judiciary, because this body rarely finishes its work.

He admits there’s a rationale, flawed though it may be, for the regulatory system:

The Congress can’t manage all the nitty gritty details of everything about modern government. And this system tries to give power and control to experts in their fields, while most of us in Congress don’t know much of anything, or, about technical matters, for sure, but you could also impugn our wisdom if you want. But when you’re talking about technical, complicated matters, it’s true that the Congress would have a hard time sorting out every final dot and tittle about every detail.

But the real reason is more self-serving. Legislators don’t want to take responsibility for difficult or unpopular decisions.

If people want to get reelected over and over again, and that’s their highest goal—if your biggest long-term thought around here is about your own incumbency, then actually giving away your power is a pretty good strategy. It’s not a very good life, but it’s a pretty good strategy for incumbency.

In the abstract, maybe it doesn’t seem so awful. But it has real life consequences to the people. Sasse offers an example of his fellow Nebraskans:

When Congress neuters itself and gives power to an unaccountable fourth branch of government, it means the people are cut out of the process. There’s nobody in Nebraska, there’s nobody in Minnesota or Delaware who elected the Deputy Assistant Administrator of Plant Quarantine at the USDA. And yet, if the Deputy Assistant Administrator of Plant Quarantine does something to make Nebraskans’ lives really difficult—which happens to farmers and ranchers in Nebraska—who do they protest to?

As the senator points out,

Almost all the power right now happens offstage. And that leaves a lot of people wondering, “Who’s looking out for me?”

He does offer a solution. It’s one of those simple but not easy things, but it beats what we’ve been doing:

The solution here is not to try to find judges who will be policy makers. The solution is not to try to turn the Supreme Court into an election battle for TV. The solution is to restore a proper Constitutional order, with a balance of powers. We need Schoolhouse Rock back.

We need a Congress that writes laws and then stands before the people and suffers the consequences and gets to go back to our own Mount Vernon, if that’s what the electors decide. We need an executive branch that has a humble view of its job, as enforcing the law, not trying to write laws in the Congress’s absence. And we need a judiciary to trust to apply written law to facts and cases that are actually before it.

This is the elegant and the fair process that the founders created. It’s the process where the people who are elected—two and six years in this institution, four years in the executive branch—can be fired. Because the justices, and the judges, the men and women who serve America’s people by wearing black robes, they’re insulated from politics.

So, we need to stop playing the decades-long game of politics surrounding the Supreme Court. Maybe we can get that if Congress will take back its power. There are hints that that could happen. The rolling back of regulations is a start. Making sure any new legislation is simple, straightforward, and necessary, based on the proper role or the federal government would help.

And—as it appears is a possibility at last—we can have a majority on the Court that know the limits of their power and abide by the law, instead of making it up as they go.

If you’ve got a young person around who isn’t getting taught this kind of civics in school, share Senator Sasse’s lesson with them. The whole 15 minutes is below. And for younger kids, maybe you should look up some of those old Schoolhouse Rock videos online. It’s amazing how the tunes—and the messages they carried—can come back decades later.