Sunday, February 19, 2006

My Week


(random) hey, i just stumbled upon this quote a second ago: "There is no one alive who is youer than you" - Dr. Suess. i just thought it was neat.

Anyway...

Well, my great week started last Sunday. I went to church with the Novo Ministries group (only the coolest collection of people here at the TC). The Novo people go to various government housing projects and put on Bible clubs for the kids. After church, we went to Val's house and celebrated Amanda's birthday, played some games, went to evening service, and returned to the TC sometime after 7:30.



Monday - Thursday are my work days at the capitol. I really enjoyed this week, main reason being that the House actually accomplished somethings in session this week. I got to watch them pass a few bills on Tuesday and Wednesday. It was pretty cool. While there was no debate on any of the bills, there was one bill that the author received quite a bit of interrogating over. I think it had something to do with health insurance. There were only three reps questioning the author but...they certainly had a lot of questions. I think they were democrats, but I'm not sure. I do know that the author was a republican. Anyway, after they were through with their interrogation, the voting began and they (the three questioners) were quick to vote "Nay." Heh, they were also the only ones to vote negative. Two of them ended up changing their votes later. One changed his vote when the count was around 15 - 3. The other cracked at 48 - 2. So in the end the the tally was about 98 - 1 (a few reps weren't present during the vote).
I also got a glimpse of "the ugly side of politics" as my Rep. Jett put it. What happened was, another rep came into Jett's office to chat for a little bit. So they chatted for a while, and then Jett asked the rep (we'll call him "Rep. In The Know" or "ITK" for short) what he knew about another rep's trying to steal one of his (Jett's) bills. This other rep (we'll call him "Rep. Bully" or "Bully" for short) is the chairman of the committee that Jett's bill was going to be sent to. Because committee chairmen basically have the power to kill a bill even before it's heard in the committee. So, in the course of Jett's conversation with ITK, it became evident that Bully was trying to use his chairman power to get authorship credit for a bill he had not done any work on. In other words Bully's name would go on the bill as "Author," and Jett would be demoted to co-author. Yes it's a very mean thing to do. From what I have been able to gather, it is something that is done often between republicans and democrats. But, in this case, Bully was a republican seeking to steal a bill from another republican - Jett.

Oh boy! it's dinner time and i must go. (sigh) and i was supposed to tell you more about Rep. Jett. oh well...next time...hopefully.

1 comment:

cd2078 said...

Yup, Todd internecine warfare does happen in politics. Political life can be very self-serving