Senate Journal: Page 926: Wednesday, April 2, 1997

  926 JOURNAL OF THE SENATE 80th Day
  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.

  Those 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.

Iowa General Assembly

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

© 1997 Cornell College and League of Women Voters of Iowa

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