While anyone is welcome to read the following, it is fairly specific to the legislature. I have been charged, like those who came before me, with cataloging and defining some of our legislative terms. Here is a sample of some of those terms, many passed down to me by other more worthy sages: • Amendment: something that completely changes your idea in a way you probably didn’t realize at the time. • Budget: your thing isn’t in it, I checked. • Causation: what makes something happen. Never as important to know as who makes something happen. • Caucusation: caused by the caucus. It is possible for the caucus to cause something that no individual member, alone, wants. • Chambered: the result of the process whereby the innate hatred of one chamber is spent upon the bill of the other chamber before sending it back as a friendly amendment (see below). • Committee: where a group of people you know individually act collectively in an unrecognizable way to create a product that no individual understands. • Committee Staff: they’re supposed to fix what happened in committee; they are to create the friendly amendment (see below). A certain percentage of these employees go criminally insane every 105 days and have to be replaced. • Confidential: something you have no problem keeping, it’s all those other bastards you tell who leak it. • Cutoff: something your idea is always beyond; your hopes will also be this (see below); your floor speech will be this when you say the wrong thing (or the right thing wrongly—it’s okay not to know the difference, the Speaker will handle that detail for you). • Dead: no bill stays this, except yours. • Floored: having the whole body do something big to you or your bill. You usually won’t know it’s happening, or about to happen; it is safe to say you will be floored by what happens. • Friendly Amendment: there’s really no such thing; a mythical creature, like seeing a unicorn or Larry Crouse on Friday. • Hopper: where bills are dropped for introduction. • Hopper-Mad: to be furious about a bill introduction, as in, “Rep. Smith will be hopper-mad when she sees what Rep. Jones just dropped!” • Hope: a retired legislator; when he left, there was no Hope in the building, not for you or your bill. • Plan: the first part of a plan going wrong is having a plan, so don’t. • Script: you need this so that people can go off-script; part of the plan. • Speaker: you don’t need to worry about the Speaker; if he needs something, he’ll let you know (see Floored, above). • Vote: the individual and collective tally of members affirmatively indicating, in a formal setting, support or opposition to a particular matter specifically before them. • Vote Count: how members say they will vote; has no correlation to the vote. In particular, this may be of interest to...
Posted on: Sun, 14 Dec 2014 17:10:17 +0000
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