As you might have surmised from the title of this post, today was the deadline for Massachusetts legislators to file bills for the upcoming legislative session. (Sessions last two years, bills filed by the deadline are guaranteed a committee assignment and public hearing. Bills filed after the deadline, known as "late-files," have to go through the Committee on Rules before they get assignments and are not guaranteed anything.) When I was still a wee intern just over a month ago my boss was finalizing the list of bills that he wanted to file for this sessions.
Many legislators who have been around for a while re-file a lot of bills. They take bills that didn't get made into law last time around for whatever reason and put them back through the ringer in the hopes that things will work out better this time around. (I have no idea how often re-files actually get passed on subsequent filings... that would be interesting to find out.) Because my boss was a firrst-term legislator last session he didn't have a lot of re-files. One, to be exact. So that meant that all of his bills had to be researched and drafted. When he reviewed the list of possible bills in November with his interns and at-the-time aide, he was able to pare down his list of 40 ideas to 12 or so workable bills.
Then I took over the aide job and have since been making sure that the bills got written. Some were drafted by outside forces but many were done in-house, largely by me subject to boss review. And of course the 12 that were decided on grew a little bit until, in the end, we filed 17 bills. (My boss was also involved heavily with 2 others that different legislators filed and listed him as a co-lead sponsor.)
And that's the civics lesson for today, kids. On our next episode we'll discuss committee assignments and all the ways bills die before their time.