Ilissa's Adventures On The House Floor

Yesterday was Progressive Bloggers Day on the Hill, upon which I descended with my fellow crazy moonbat lib'ruls.  Here's the good and the bad of it.

The Bad

I'll start with the bad, since that was more or less how the afternoon started.  We were addressed first by House Democratic Caucus chairman Mike Turner and then by the oh-so-cute Representative Ty Cobb of Columbia, regarding how he planned on addressing the needs of his constituents in the light of the Saturn plant in Spring Hill being idled by GM.  My plan for victory in 2010 involves cloning Ty Cobb and running him against every vulnerable Republican.  But barring that, a coherent message might help.

Unfortunately, Rep. Turner was rather vague on the details for next year.  Due to time constraints we weren't able to ask as much as I would have liked, but the only way all Democrats are going to get back on the same page after recent disagreements over guns and abortion is if we have some grand overarching message that we can all agree on, if we can all articulate what it means to be a Democrat and why we are all Democrats even if we sometimes disagree on the details.  If more than six months after the November beat-down we still don't know what that message is, we're in serious trouble.

And then there was the utterly condescending remark made to Aunt B.  I wanted to interject but she was getting the point across far better than I could have.  How can half the populatoin act as a proper interest group?  The reason why the "women's groups" come up to the Hill for abortion votes is because control of our very bodies is what's at stake, and because those are the bills that everyone knows about.

Which brings me to Newscoma's point.  Rep. Turner complained that when House Democrats DO pass good legislation for women (i.e. equal pay, Title X funding), it doesn't get attention.  First, just as an aside, I did write about the Title X thing.  Secondly, and more importantly, we don't even know what's going on half the time in the legislature, or when these important bills are coming up.  Newscoma brought this up and thought it might be a geographical problem, but I live in Nashville (sometimes anyway) and I don't know when important legislation is coming up either.  Hell, I wouldn't have even known when the S.J.R. 127 vote from two weeks ago was happening had I not read about it on Twitter from Mary Mancini.  We hear about the abortion and gun bills because that's what we hear about in the mainstream news.  But we don't know about the other bills we should support or oppose.

The importance of that information cannot be emphasized enough.  Bloggers want to help!  Bloggers want to be a part of the conversation.  But we can't do that if we have no idea what's going on, and that's where we need the help of those in the legislature who can feed us that information.  You can't be angry at us for not saying the "right" things if all we're hearing is the "wrong" things.  If I could have said one more thing to Mike Turner, to paraphrase Jerry Maguire--"help us help you."

After meeting with Mike Turner, we went to sit in on a meeting of the full House Democratic Caucus, where I realized that no matter what titles Mike Turner and Gary Odom may hold, when Jimmy Naifeh speaks it leaves no doubt as to who is still running the show.  Rep. Hank Fincher drew applause from the bloggers when he expressed his frustration with always compromising with the Republicans.  He analogized it by saying that if they're determined to drive the bus into a ditch, to let them and stop grabbing the steering wheel.  I liked that.

So, that was the bad.  Then I got to go on the House floor.

The Good

Stepping onto the House floor, I felt that same excitement that I had felt as an awkward high school freshman on my first day of YMCA Youth Legislature.  So now I was back, as a still-fairly-awkward-but-better-dressed law student.  This may not seem like that big of a deal to the average person reading this, but to me, it was.

This is how close up I was:

The bloggers got the chance to sit with our state representatives, which was problematic for me because my representative is Beth Harwell.  So instead I sat with the next closest Democrat, Gary Odom, whose seat is front and center on the floor.  His seat is next to that of my new friend, the absolutely hilarious Rep. Craig Fitzhugh from Ripley.  Odom stood up to recognize me in front of the rest of the House, although the amazing choral group from Memphis that had just been recognized was a tough act to follow.

I then remained on the floor for the full four and a half hours of session, taking it all in.  Most of the bills discussed were mundane, but there were some doozies.  On the plus side, the House voted to extend unemployment benefits.  Of course, they also voted to make it easier for upstream land owners to pollute and to encourage the U.S. Senate to reject the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, so it was par for the course for this House.

Gary Odom let me push the voting buttons for him on a few votes, which was exciting since they NEVER let us so much as touch the buttons in Youth Legislature.  It's a good thing he was at his desk for the stream bill, for which he voted, because I would have been waaaay too tempted to "accidentally" hit the nay button.

In addition to meeting quite a few of the Democratic representatives, I met some notorious Republicans as well.  Jason Mumpower, Glen Casada, Bill Dunn, and the needing-no-introduction Stacey Campfield came up to say hi and introduce themselves.  And I must say, they were all as gracious and gentlemanly as could be.  I may disagree with them on everything--had anything about abortion or guns come up in this session, I may have had to steal Jason Mumpower's "voting stick" and start whacking people with it--but they're not bad people.  I guess that can be the House GOP message for next year: "We'll lead this state to hell in a handbasket, but we'll at least be stand-up guys about it!"

Glen Casada decides he can do a better job running the House Caucus than Mike Turner:

So, that part of the afternoon was a ton of fun.  I'm very grateful to Rep. Turner and House Democratic Caucus spokesman Addison Pate for setting it up, and to Reps. Odom and Fitzhugh for letting me sit with them and learn about the process.

But seriously, do let me know when we figure out what the message is.  You'll know where to find me...