By PATRICK O'GRADY

What's it like to work for the General Assembly?

THEY ARE the people you never see. They are there, but you just don't notice them when you watch a politician answering questions in a press conference or debating on the floor of the General Assembly. They are the legislative staff. If you look, you will see them off to the side — usually with a manila folder in hand. Available, but not intruding.

Staff people are generally young men and women in their 20s and 30s. They usually have at least a bachelor's degree (Illinois schools preferred, thank you), and many have a graduate degree. Most staff are aggressive. They have to be, even if their outward disposition is relaxed, to be attracted to and survive in the legislative arena.

The reason staff people are there is simple. Somebody has to read everything. Even the most conscientious legislator can't read all of the bills. This past session the Legislative Reference Bureau drafted nearly 5,000 documents for the legislature — that's about 15-20 million words. Of these, 3,200 bills were introduced, or about 10-12 million words. These bills, plus amendments, produced a stack nearly four feet tall — thousands of pages, all in legalese. It is not what one would call light reading.

According to the statute which created the staff positions in 1969: "There shall be such staff assistants for the General Assembly as necessary. . . . During the period the General Assembly is in session, the staff assistants shall be assigned by the legislative leadership of the respective parties to perform research and render other assistance to the members of that party on such committees as may be designated. During the period when the General Assembly is not in session

It is not the staff's role to judge whether bills should or should not be passed. Some proposals, however, are obvious candidates for extinction

the staff assistants shall perform such services as may be assigned by the party leadership" (Ill. Rev. Stat. 1979, ch. 63, sec. 131.1, 132).

In order to explain what this means on a day-to-day basis during a legislative session, let's look at what staff do at various points in the legislative process.

Bill introduction

An idea for a bill can come from almost anywhere: from a staff director, a legislator or from staffers themselves. Staff take the idea and develop a bill. This can be as crude a process as bringing a newspaper clipping to the Legislative Reference Bureau and saying, "Give me a bill to do this." Or it can be as sophisticated as a detailed proposal based on months of research.

Irate constituents, particularly if they are organized, can usually convince a legislator to have a proposal drafted. Even obviously bad ideas are introduced this way, though most of the bad ideas are quickly consigned to a "conscientious and hardworking" subcommittee that may never meet.

Lobbyists also generate many bill ideas. A lobbyist might go looking with bill in hand for a friendly legislator. Or he might propose the general idea to the legislator and work out the details of the actual bill with the staff. The fee a lobbyist charges, or the size of the organization he represents, does not always guarantee the idea will be properly drafted. I recall one high-priced lawyer who drafted an amendment to place a cap on the amount of cash assistance that would be provided to certain local authorities. Instead of guaranteeing that the state would be protected from excessive payments, the amendment contained an error which limited payments to an annual total of slightly more than $4 billion. That's the reason why staff review bills and amendments to make sure they are in proper form, are complete, and do what they are supposed to do.

Completeness is important because even a simple idea can produce a lengthy bill. For example, the current state sales tax exemption for gasohol can be expressed in about 60 words, but the bill to provide the exemption was over 40 pages long. That's because the "sales tax" is actually a series of occupation and use taxes. The local sales tax is similar, and it piggybacks the state tax. So if the original bill is incomplete or incorrectly drafted, the gasohol exemption might be flawed, or it might unintentionally carry through to the local level.

Most people can guess what a "vehicle bill" is. If the "Widget Control Act," has developed a problem, but the timing isn't right to draft a firm proposal to solve it, legislators sometimes like to introduce a vehicle bill. Nothing more than a shell, the bill moves through the legislative process until it is stripped of its original provisions and used as the vehicle for the new idea. Spotting vehicle bills is the legislative version of hide-and-seek. For example, the members of a committee may decide to allow only one proposal to advance to the floor if the issue being considered is particularly sensitive. To maintain control of the issue, committee members try to at least identify and perhaps kill vehicle bills which, if passed by committee, might later be used to rejuvenate opposing ideas which the committee has already defeated.

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Controlling vehicle bills is difficult, since almost any bill can be used as a vehicle. However, some bills are obvious vehicles. A bill which changes only one comma in an existing statute is blatant, but it happens. Once, to bring some humor to the hectic rush to get bills drafted by the deadline, I took a vehicle bill and replaced a deleted paragraph with a drawing of a Ford sedan. My intention was to point to the obvious — "this is a vehicle bill." To my chagrin, the bill was not properly disposed of, and was almost introduced.

Committee work

Analyzing bills prior to committee hearing in the house of origin is the first big job for staff. This is the first time they have seen the bills. Some are vehicles; some are merely ideas left over from the previous session. Most are only roughly drafted, since this is the first deliberative step in the legislative process. All of this makes the bills harder to analyze.

Sometimes the sponsor is unaware of the flaws or harmful effects of his bill, but later they are discovered and explained in the staff analysis. If another legislator likes the basic idea of the bill, he may use the analysis to improve the bill. If he dislikes it, he may remain silent and wait for the flaws to be uncovered when it is too late to fix them. Or, he might use the analysis to blast the idea out of existence. However, thoughtful criticism can also be taken to heart; the bill can be amended to meet the criticism, and reasons for objecting to the bill are gone.

It is not the staff's role to judge whether bills should or should not be passed. Some proposals, however, are obvious candidates for extinction. This creates a sensitive problem for staff, particularly if the bill is sponsored by a member of their own party. The responsibility of staff is to assist the sponsor in defending and improving his bill, but staff also have a responsibility to the other members of the party who may be damaged by supporting the bill. My favorite phrase for these occasions was: "Opponents are likely to argue that. . . ." This helped the sponsor prepare his defense. It also told the other members to watch out.

Staff analysis of bills at the committee stage is usually only one or two pages long. It may take hours of study to understand a bill's ramifications, but once a staffer learns what is important to his committee members — and to his side of the aisle — what to highlight becomes obvious: "This bill imposes a tax increase without referendum," or "This tax break favors the rich."

The workload in committee can be staggering. Senate rules require that bills be posted for hearing at least six days prior to the committee hearing, and House rules require six-and-one-half days. However, the rules are frequently waived. A staff person might learn as late as Friday morning (or later) that 50 new bills will be heard in committee the following Tuesday. Committee members and staff directors like to have the analysis 24 hours before the meeting. That means Monday morning. At an average of one hour per bill, working 17 hours a day, it gets done. It has to.

Floor work

Staff work on the floor of the House or Senate can be compared to a high-stakes College Bowl quiz. Staff have analyzed the bills, and committee members have had a chance to hear

The reason staff people are there is simple. Somebody has to read everything for extinction

them in committee, but anything can happen on the floor. When new questions come up, the sponsor turns to you and asks, "What's the answer?" If you know, you can give it with conviction. That's satisfying. But the pressure builds when the other side, without warning, unloads a 50-page amendment which deletes everything after the enacting clause and inserts a wildly different proposal. That's when staff age prematurely. It is also when they earn their paychecks; they have only a few minutes to analyze the amendment, calculate the effects and suggest lines of questioning.

Preparing amendments for floor debate is also a challenge. During the corporate personal property replacement tax debate, the issue was how to replace nearly $500 million worth of tax revenue for local governments. The problem was to make sure the amendments did what was intended, were drafted in proper form, and were compatible with various other amendments which were being proposed. The amendments were requested by different sponsors, who could easily be at cross purposes. (In a situation like this, if only four amendments are requested, several more might be needed to make compatible any combination of the four which might be adopted. If an error is made and it is caught by the chair, the amendment can be thrown out.) To my dismay, just as debate on the bill began, a senator wanted an amendment to reduce the tax rate, as of January 1. Fortunately, we had a suitable fill-in-the-blank amendment ready, so the chosen tax rate could be inserted. It passed.

When problems arise during floor debate, bills are often "taken out of the record" so that the parties involved can meet in a private room and work out differences. But even when agreement is reached, and the legislators and other top officials leave the room to walk into television lights to announce a breakthrough, staff work is just beginning. During the tax limitation debate, agreement was reached on about 16 crucial points. The news was announced and everyone went home; approval of the agreement was expected during the next day's session. Eight or 10 staffers, however, moved into the Speaker's office to put the 16 point into bill form. We worked from early evening until 6 a.m. to draft the bill. It was a substantial technical achievement, but the agreement fell through, and the bill was defeated.

The last days of session

It's not uncommon for the House to grow attached to one version of a bill and the Senate to embrace a slightly different one. When this happens and neither side will budge, the bill goes to a conference committee composed of five senators and five representatives. The purpose of the conference committee is to work out the differences. The power of the conference committee is

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to adopt whatever it chooses, provided at least six committee members sign the report, and each chamber agrees. Staff people attend the conference committee meetings and draft whatever the committee members instruct them to draft. If the differences are great, staff may have to draft an entirely new version of the bill, covering a number of issues. Conference committee reports can also become vehicle bills. An idea that has been bottled up in committee for ten weeks can pop back up in a conference committee report.

June 30, which is traditionally the last day of the regular session, can be anticlimactic if a staff person has only a few bills remaining on the calendar. But it is guaranteed to be a strain. Political solutions are often achieved when legislators are standing at the brink; June 30 is that brink. For the staff, it usually means hours of waiting, interrupted by bursts of conference committee activity.

The day starts with a sense of excitement. Food is brought in, buffets are set up. The mood is almost festive. If their work is finished, some staff might pass the time playing cards or having a drink to unwind. But by 4 a.m., each announcement that "the house will stand at ease pending the arrival of conference committee reports" is greeted with groans — and with stretching to ease the aches caused by dozing in chairs. Finally, the last report is adopted, and the adjournment resolution is approved. All that remains, for those who wish to attend, is a breakfast reception at the Governor's Mansion. The session has ended.

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