Day 1 for Moriah

This picture was taken from the gallery, while I was watching the House of Reps during session today. Today was BUSY.  It's actually too busy for them to teach me to be useful quite yet, because by the end of tomorrow they are hoping to get the State Budget passed through the House and send it on to the Senate. Aaaanyways....
This morning I took a bus to the Statehouse in Columbus, and met my boss for the next month across the street at the Riffe Building, which is where the members of the House of Reps have their offices.  Since the guy I'm working for is a member of the senior staff, I get to sit in on all kinds of meetings with the party leadership, which is very interesting to see how the whole process works.  So, here is basically a general rundown of how people meet to get things done in the House (of Ohio, at least).  Today I went to three types of meetings, which were 1)party leadership, 2) caucus, and 3) session.  Session is the whole House, both parties, every rep is there, in the statehouse building on the floor voting on the actual bills.  It's all public, anybody can sit in the gallery and watch, the press is there, etc.  Whenever session is called, Caucus generally meets one hour before session starts.  Caucus is when each party meets by themselves and strategizes for session.  So, they'll discuss which bills / amendments they like and why, give a case for why they do or don't think people in their caucus should vote for something.  It's also where the party leadership will give their recommendations as to where people should vote.  So far they just tell people to vote their conscience most of the time, but if there's an important issue and they need a united front they might tell everybody to vote a certain way.  The meeting of the party leadership is just the leaders of each party meeting in private to decide how they're going to run the caucus meeting, what they're going to recommend, etc.  Since I'm working for Democratic leader Budish, I got to go to the democratic leadership meeting and the democratic caucus meeting.  It was all very interesting.

Sorry for writing so much!  So much happened today.  My posts might not be quite as long next week as they are today, since things should quiet down once the budget gets passed. So today i went to lots of meetings, met lots of people, saw a few politicians give speeches.  This afternoon in session the House passed two bills, one that deals with gas pricing regulation and another that deals with prison sentencing reform and a whole load of other issues regarding our prison systems, how we rehabilitate prisoners, etc.  Tonight the democrats met to talk about the budget, and what the game plan is for tomorrow during session when the budget is on the floor.  The meeting went until really late... It was long, but definitely fascinating and worthwhile.

Overall today was really interesting.  The people were very friendly, and the setting was much less formal and intimidating than I was expecting.  Sorry for this huge post!  I didn't really know how to condense it any more... There was so much information thrown at me today that I'm still trying to sort it out in my own mind!

Hope you're all having fun.
Moriah