House Journal: Page 967: Wednesday, April 2, 1997

Bit by bit, there was change. It probably would shock some
people today to learn that we thought it was reform about 35
years ago when they required an explanation on the bill and
required the bill to be printed so that you could see what it
did to the law. Fiscal notes? We thought that was just short of
the Second Coming.
Through 1965, as I recall it, Senate deliberations on
gubernatorial appointments and confirmation votes took place in
executive session. The Senate would go into executive session,
throw everyone out of the chamber, and then go about its
business. That rattled one senator in 1965 because it meant his
wife, who was his secretary, had to leave the chamber and he
relied on her to tell him what to do. Some of us would make our
way to the attic, and listen to the debate through the air vents
around the chandeliers. The acoustics are perfect up there.
Some years later, I once found myself locked inside a Senate
Republican caucus. It was my single worst experience in the
reporters' trade. It was an accident. I didn't want to be there.
But I couldn't step out without being denounced as a sneak. So I
stayed, in grave jeopardy of wetting my pants, as the senators
got into a long, nasty fight over their parking places on the
east side of the capitol building. Courtesy of experiences like
that, I've never been as great an exponent of open meetings as
some of my colleagues in the Fourth Estate.
Opening the committee meetings to the public and the procedural
changes governing the drafting of bills, the advent of the
computer and the cell phone, the coming of almost instant mass
communications, high-speed highways and travel - all those
things and more have combined to make this a different place
than it was.
When I started in the reporters' trade at the Des Moines
Register and Tribune in 1957, we had to have an editor's
permission to make a long-distance telephone call. It was an
expensive and complicated endeavor, so an operator handled it
and called you when the connection was made. In 1967, as I
remember it, one of the most effective lobbyists in the place,
Ed Jones, began spending about half his time in an office
downtown, using his telephone WATTS line to energize lobbying
efforts whose need was spotted by a young associate who'd joined
him, F. Richard Thornton.
These kinds of changes in technology make it very difficult for
a member of today's legislature to handle the most important
aspect of the job: Seek and forge compromise.
We live in an exceedingly diverse place of competitive and
conflicting interests. The country would fall apart, Alistair
Cooke wrote years ago, if we did not have three secrets:
"Compromise, compromise and compromise." You have to have
trade-offs or those competing and conflicting interests will be
at each other's throats.
It's there, I think, that most of today's legislators have
failed. Perhaps because of the changes in technology, they've
forgotten or neglected a duty, as leaders, to teach their
constituents about the possibilities and the impossibilities of
government. In many places, what should be an exalted word -
compromise - has become a dirty word. Too many politicians play
to the gallery and talk about seeking victory rather than
accommodation. They may not quite mean what they say but they
always have listeners who believe. The result is a dissemination
of anger, hate, distrust and suspicion, and ultimately a lack of
comprehension that in fact, in the end, we all want and are
seeking the same goals.
Thank you and good luck.
On motion by Siegrist of Pottawattamie, the joint convention was
dissolved at 2:45 p.m.

Iowa General Assembly

Index: House Journal (77th General Assembly: Session 1)

© 1997 Cornell College and League of Women Voters of Iowa

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