For the past quarter century, my journalism has mostly revolved around statehouses. I feel old just saying this out loud.
But age comes with perspective.
So, here are a couple of helpful tips I’ve picked up from stalking the committee rooms and the hallways of the Roundhouse over the past two decades.
State lawmakers only have so much time to pass a few priorities — in this year’s session, passing a state budget and getting it to the governor is the top priority. There are a few others, but the budget takes up most of the oxygen.
Which means the vast majority of the hundreds of bills filed at the start of the session — with just one week left in the session — are mostly dead. What is mostly dead? Here I defer to Miracle Max in the classic 1987 film, The Princess Bride, to explain: “There’s a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive.”
That’s as good an existential prognosis for most bills entering the final week of a session as you can get.
A reporter never wants to say a bill is all dead until the final day when the gavel comes down. Which brings us to the second lesson: As soon as you say something is dead, as in all dead and not mostly dead, some creative lawmaker will employ a legislative procedure to make the public think twice about your powers of prediction.
Such as, inserting the contents of the mostly dead bill into a separate bill that has momentum and the backing of powerful lawmakers. Or using so-called dummy bills — that is, blank legislation with no contents — to try to push the legislation over the finish line.
Both procedures require powerful interests to propel a bill to legislative success, so not every bill qualifies for such maneuvering. Otherwise, it’d be chaos at the Roundhouse.
Hopefully you get the point, though. Like Miracle Max advises, mostly dead means slightly alive — until, that is, the gavel comes down on the final day of the session.
As we close in on the final days of the session there is only so much time and energy state lawmakers have to push through bills to success during a 30-day session. Think of a legislative session as a funnel.
The start of a session is like the mouth of a funnel, it’s wide and has the capacity to accommodate a lot of bills. But as the session goes on, the funnel narrows into a small opening, with a much smaller set of bills making it to the governor’s desk.
The last week is the most exciting, and for many, stressful time of a legislative session.
This is when the horse trading and behind-closed-doors meetings reach a crescendo as state lawmakers haggle, cajole and plead with other lawmakers, legislative leaders — in some cases, even with the governor or her staff — to help their bills get through the Legislature.
Of course, legislative leaders also are busy negotiating with the governor, making sure bills the Legislature passes aren’t “veto-bait”, by which I mean don’t risk a gubernatorial veto that kills the legislation.
There are a lot of other things to know about legislative wrangling.
If you’re interested you can always tune in yourself by going to the Legislature’s website, nmlegis.gov, and watching the webcasts of legislative committee meetings and floor sessions in the House and Senate.
Trip Jennings started his career in Georgia at his hometown newspaper, The Augusta Chronicle, before working at newspapers in California, Florida and Connecticut where he reported on many stories, including the resignation and incarceration of Connecticut’s then-governor, John Rowland, and gang warfare in California.
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, Georgia.
In 2012, he co-founded New Mexico In Depth, a nonpartisan, nonprofit media outlet that produces investigative, data-rich stories with an eye on solutions that can be a catalyst for change.