The Empowered Citizens Guide: 10 Steps to Passing a Law that Matters to You by Pat Libby

Author:Pat Libby [Libby, Pat]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780197601655
Publisher: OxfordUP
Published: 2022-01-24T00:00:00+00:00

It’s a Small World

The world is a surprisingly small place. It’s likely that if you ask around, you’ll find connections to legislators through everyday people you know. You might find that your brother-in-law works at the same company as one of the legislators, a cousin of yours played on the dude’s high school football team, or your sister’s kids are in the same class as the legislator’s kids. These personal connections really do help. After all, legislators are people, too.

When you map out the legislative terrain, it’s also critically important to be aware of how each “half” of the legislature plays with the other. The reason I put the word half in quotes is because sometimes there is a partisan divide between each house, where Republicans make up most of the members of one side and Democrats the other. Sometimes you have a single house, like a town council or county board, that’s also divided by partisanship.

If there is a bitter partisan divide, you’ll want to draw upon the personal connections you’ve discovered in the mapping process to help pave a smooth path for the different parties to work together. Tip O’Neill, a long-time Speaker of the House in Congress, famously said, “All politics is local,” by which he meant making personal connections between politicians and constituents is the best way to get things done.i Interestingly, he had an extremely close relationship with President Ronald Reagan, who was a member of the opposite party and often held radically different views from Tip. Although you don’t see much of that on the national level today, bills that have bipartisan support (meaning, they’re sponsored by members of both major parties) are more likely to pass.

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