By Manny Frishberg, JTNews Correspondent
With fewer than 24 hours left in her term, Laura Ruderman spent her last day as a Washington State representative explaining the ins and outs of how a bill becomes a law, at least in Olympia.
“Everyone knows the Schoolhouse Rock version of how a bill becomes a law,” Ruderman told a group of about a dozen, mostly members of the Seattle section of the National Council of Jewish Women in the penthouse meeting room of Council House in Seattle’s First Hill, “but that’s not really the way it happens.”
In Ruderman’s version, the stages of getting a bill through the legislature and on to the governor’s desk for a signature consists mainly of opportunities for it to pass away unnoticed. She says thousands of potential laws are submitted each legislative session, the vast majority of which wither from benign neglect.
Committee chairs have the option to bring the bills up for a hearing—usually about 15 minutes at one of the committee’s public sessions—and whether to bring it to a vote after that. Then there are “money committees” for bills that affect the budget and the Rules Committee, whose chairmen have the same choices. Then it goes to the Senate, where the same thing goes on. And, because the legislature meets for just three or four months each year, there are deadlines for each step along the way.
The gathering on Jan. 9 was the latest of what executive director Lauren Simonds called “Tea and Topics.” a monthly get-together over coffee and snacks, sponsored by the local NCJW.
Laura Ruderman was a natural as the leader of this session, focused on encouraging people to become their own lobbyists. “I’ve been on both sides of the desk,” she noted.
Ruderman traces her own involvement in politics to getting involved with a grassroots lobbying group, called Results, when she was a teenager growing up in New York City. Results, she said, “trains ordinary citizens to lobby Congress on issues of hunger and poverty.”
For the next 10 years she met with her Congressional representatives when they came to her home district or with their staff members when she visited Washington D.C.
“When I got elected to the legislature in 1998, I was so excited. I was going to get to sit on the other side of the desk while all these other well-organized, grassroots citizen-lobbyists came to meet with me,” Ruderman said with just a hint of the irony she was unfolding. “What I discovered is that most groups don’t have organized citizen-lobbyists.”
Her disappointment was not that intensely interested constituents did not come to see her, but that their presence was too sporadic. “They may go down for a day but there isn’t that sort of persistence” that make lobbyists truly effective, she said. “I started doing this Effective Grassroots Lobbying workshop as a method to get citizens more involved, as a method to get organizations to do more of what I wished people would have come to me to do.”
To that end, she offered up a list of five basic principles and one singular piece of advice.
“You’re always playing for another day,” she said, meaning that what is most important is building a relationship with the legislator, not just making points on a solitary issue.
“The very first question you should always ask when you meet your legislator for the very first time, ask them why they ran for office.” Ruderman says, “It gets the member out of their head and into their heart, and reminds them why they got involved in this thankless job in the first place.”
What’s more, she said, by listening closely the lobbyists may well hear something that tells them how to approach their representative on their particular issues.
Her rules all follow from that guiding thought:
One: Be polite.
“Ask your legislator how they like to be communicated with. Those of us who were trained at Microsoft read our e-mail,” she said. Other legislators she has worked with have aides print out all their e-mails before reading them and a few, she says, seem never to have even opened their legislative laptops.
Two: be from the district the legislator represents.
“Until I ran statewide,” joked Ruderman, who lost her bid for Secretary of State last November, “I didn’t care what people in Spokane think.” More seriously, she recommended including an address when e-mailing the legislature “so we know you’re from the district.” The exception, she said, is that certain members have other “natural constituencies”—as one of a handful of Jewish legislators in Olympia, Ruderman was always open to people wanting to present a Jewish perspective.
Three: “Be informed.”
“Know if I’m a man or a woman; know if I’m in the House or the Senate.” Few things raise a senator’s ire like being called “Representative” and vice-versa, she said. By the same token, Ruderman advised knowing generally where the member stands on the matters you have to discuss.
Four: Be specific
Ask for some particular action: (“Ask the chairman to hold a hearing on this bill”)
Five: Be persistent.
Follow up with the legislator or her staff, said Ruderman. People get busy and don’t always get around to doing what they say they will, and not always because they didn’t intend to.
NCJW’s Simonds said her section members will have three chances to practice their new-found lobbying skills in February.
“We’ll try to mobilize our members to go to three organized rally days: the Marriage Equity Day rally on the 14th of February, Pro-Choice Lobby Day on the 15th of February and Domestic Violence Lobby Day on the 16th of February,” she said.
For more information on these events or NCJW’s Seattle Section activities, call 425-558-1894.