I’m writing this column between strolls through the Roundhouse on Monday afternoon. You see splatters of green everywhere. The Irish are everywhere on St. Patrick’s Day, it seems.
It is the last week of the 60-day legislative session in Santa Fe and I like to stroll because the walls talk to you if you’ve covered a statehouse long enough.
Obviously, the walls don’t literally talk. It’s a piece of journalistic counsel I got from older, more experienced news reporters in my first statehouse gig in Hartford, Connecticut. What my elders meant is that you can find out what’s going on — what bills are moving, which legislation is dead, who’s made a deal with whom and what deals are dead — by talking to the lobbyists, lawmakers or legislative staff who themselves are roaming the statehouse hunting for the latest scoop. It’s a version of the axiom I grew up hearing in my first newspaper jobs: If you’re sitting at your desk, you’re not where the news is. You gotta get out and beat the bushes, in other words, to borrow a cliche from the older generation of editors who raised me up when I was a cub reporter.
No one had to tell me twice to walk and talk. I was born with the gift of gab, meaning I can talk to anyone anywhere. My family hates to go anywhere with me because I will start talking to complete strangers if something about them interests me.
This being the week to celebrate the patron saint of Ireland means I feel the temptation to chalk up my chattiness to the Irish part of my Scots-Irish heritage, but it’s more likely I picked up my talkativeness growing up in a family of salesmen. Salesmanship is more helpful than you think in journalism. Reporting is equal parts selling yourself, part listening closely, part confirming what you heard.
So, every legislative session since my first in Hartford, I’ve roamed the halls prowling for news, which is what I’ve been doing all day and why this column might read a little disjointed. I’ve spent my days walking but also stopping to have long conversations with lobbyists, activists and lawmakers, sometimes about what’s going on in the Roundhouse, sometimes about movies, or books, or the importance of wearing green on St Patrick’s Day.
I’ve learned over the years statehouse reporting, like all journalism, is built on relationships and it is important to get to know people as people, not just as lobbyists, or activists, or state lawmakers.
People are more likely to talk to you if you truly are listening to what they care about and what moves them as human beings.
One last thing about statehouse reporting. You can never declare anything sure to pass other than the state budget every session or that any legislation is dead until the session is over.
You never know what will happen in the waning days of a legislative session. There are innumerable ways to kill legislation. It’s much harder to pass something than to kill it. Successful bills run a weeks-long gauntlet of legislative scrutiny and likely have been vetted in previous legislative sessions.
Even so, you can watch a bill defy the odds. More than a decade ago, I and others watched the House and Senate pass a major tax package that included breaks to various industries with lightning speed, clearing both chambers in less than 60 minutes just before the noon deadline on the final day of that year’s session.
That was an exception, however. Most bills die.
But you can never say something is dead, for sure, which is why a few of us in the capitol press corps in Santa Fe began referring to bills that looked gummed up in a legislative committee, the “walking dead.” As Miracle Max in the film The Princess Bride counseled Andre the Giant and Mandy Patinkin who were trying to save Cary Elwes before they stormed Prince Humperdinck’s castle, “There’s a big difference between all dead and mostly dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive.”
In other words, the bill you think is dead might just be one miraculous resurrection away from passing the Legislature.
And that is why I didn’t handicap any bills in this column, as disappointing as you might find it. I’m waiting for state lawmakers to adjourn before I predict what bills pass or die. It’s safer that way.
Trip Jennings started his career in Georgia at his hometown newspaper, The Augusta Chronicle, before working at newspapers in California, Florida and Connecticut. Since 2005, Trip has covered politics and state government for the Albuquerque Journal, The New Mexico Independent and the Santa Fe New Mexican. He holds a Master’s of Divinity from Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Ga. In 2012, he co-founded New Mexico In Depth.