What i think i learned

I feel like I have kinda won my freedom inside a diabetes context. Most everything I ever wanted has been achieved…at least to some degree. The wheels are in motion. So, I started an analysis of what all had happened over the past ten years retrospectively.

I had one, lingering, overarching question that frustrated me. It was, “Why did my representative not even listen to me explain my problem with maintaining a drivers license when I went to her?” I was a constituent and that is her job. She did something bad to me, which was to not even speak with me. I couldn’t come up with any answer other than, “She hates diabetics,” because that was the only thing she knew about me. But that’s not the right answer. I was missing something.

So, I went down to my local precinct (her kingdom) out of curiosity to see what people did down there and do some general information gathering. As I see it, all my work has concluded, so there’s nothing to loose from going in and being totally open and having conversations with people.

After much misery, what I think I learned is that you can kinda subdivide the legislature into two different categories - partisan or policy. You have both types in both parties. You usually know instantaneously which type you are dealing with when you walk out of their office.

POLICY PEOPLE
Some people work in practical problem solving. Those people are like me. I call them, “policy people.” Policy people build relationships and deal in creative problem solving because that’s how you move legislation through the meatgrinder. You need to know everything about a problem in order to pass legislation that has any hope of being effective, to communicate about that problem with a wide variety of people, and gain trust.

PARTISAN PEOPLE
Talking to partisans is really tough. They exist in both parties. You can spin a problem any which way to try to spark interest in the partisans. It’s just not gonna be super effective because solving problems is neither their interest nor their role. Partisans play a role where they tow the party line and move money around. They take orders from above…from the party and do its bidding. Their work is a lot more bureaucratic and kinda boring.

You get different personality types drawn to either role. Sometimes people switch roles. So, when my Federal Senator became the whip, his people told me outright that he just was not able to participate in policy making anymore. He moved into partisan. There’s a lot of contradictory goals between policy makers and partisans. People are primarily doing one or the other.

In summary, when you go down to your legislature to ask for something as a constituent, if you hit a partisan person and you aren’t passing party-related legislation, then you just keep walking. You just go around them and find yourself a policy girl or guy to help you do the work. You want to find helpers on both sides of the isle. That’s how it works, anyway, if you don’t have any money. If you have money, then you just write a check to the partisan players. Those are money guys.

P.S. I really scared the ■■■■ out of those local partisans when I went sniffing around down there. I think its because I’m policy and I’m working Federal. They got really paranoid. They asked me a lot of questions about what I was doing there. I tried to answer honestly, but I honestly didn’t know. I was just curious how it works down there.

At that level of government, its not really a place for relationship building, its more like a viper pit of suspicious partisans trying to achieve very specific, well defined goals related to election outcomes and fundraising. That’s really different than what I do. It was good for me to explore that difference in roles. It helped me understand the system. They have a lot of difficulty maintaining relationships with one another at that level because people there have such diverse, nonoverlapping motivations. It’s really the opposite of the role I function in.

Here is a song about endings. It’s happy to achieve all the stuff that you want. But its also kinda sad and disorienting to not have further objective. Some people say that you always ought to leave a string of something that interests you left to explore so you don’t dry up. I don’t know what that is. I’m kinda relieved. I think this whole death march into legislative activities could be over for me.

This song even gets a little partisan at the end. When you hear stuff like that it stops you dead in your tracks because you know that you aren’t talking about policy and problems and ideas anymore. You aren’t gonna accomplish anything in this office. You are not gonna learn anything in this office. When you hear a partisan voice, you know that no one in this place wants to solve actual problems and its time to just keep walking to the next meeting. You see it on both sides. It’s the worst - excitable, partisan yapping is not the same as problem solving and doing the real business of government.

Everybody knows where to find me if they need me. I’m gonna lay low.

Fundamentally, when I moved that leg at the State,

I had a Republican Senator (and the GOP controlled the Senate, which was good for me. I was his constituent, which is extra good). He was a policy guy. That’s a requirement for moving policy.

I had a Republican House member. She was the worst thing ever because she was a partisan. Even though I was her constituent, it mattered not. She neither power, nor interest in moving policy. In the best of times, even if her party controlled the House, I was not gonna get anywhere. I didn’t have any money. That’s a dead end there.

So, then, I just went around her (on the advice of my Senator who knows how to move policy) to a DFL member of the House, even though I wasn’t his constituent. He was a policy guy and was from a large, powerful district. DFL controlled the House, so that was the right guy for me.

The House was actually kinda sticky. I thought that if I had the support of a majority member and got something through comittee, I was all good. But, the job of those minority partisans is to raise hell and impede the majority, no matter what. I was facing difficulties that I will call, “Yappy partisan minority” problems. They were even giving it to the Senators that were in the same party as them (which I didn’t expect), in order to impede the majority in their House. They made stuff super hard on me. I got it done, once the guys communicated about the difficulties they were facing - difficulties with yappy, trouble making minority partisans. But at the time, I didn’t understand. I thought, “Why do they hate me because I’m a diabetic and I want to have a drivers license?” I was really confused on that point. Didn’t make sense. Now, I understand that that’s just what partisan minority members do. It has nothing to do with your policy or you. It’s kinda their only job to be trouble makers about every little thing in any way that they can. It’s prob a better strategy to just avoid them all together until you have to deal with them. Don’t let them catch wind of anything you are up to.

I think all of this is applicable at a Federal level. It might be advantageous though to talk to a few of the right people, instead of just talking to a LOT of people (which is what I did when I didn’t know what I was doing). Talking to a lot of people can also be a viable strategy, but you can accidentally drum up trouble.

None of that legislative work even mattered in the end. If it would have failed, then I would sued them and they were in violation of a bunch of State laws that they, themselves, wrote. So, I would have won.

Suing the State is a lot of work and its more expensive, so that was last resort. By this point, I would have been funded by ADA…had it come to that. We were dangerously close to that after 5 years. I was livid at that point. But, the more practical thing was to make them aware of all the ways that they were in violation of the law. Since they are almost all lawyers, that’s pretty effective. It helps them understand why I could sue them and win. Once they understood that fully (by explaining to their most vocal partisans, all the ways that they were, personally, in violation of the law), I helped them revise the law so that they are no longer in violation and so that I feel happy about the law and that I’m happy to follow it.

Once I understood the role that the partisans were playing, they were easy to take down. Partisans don’t really work in policy. They don’t look at the details. They don’t know anything about the subject matter. They don’t make a good legal case. They are just doing random stuff to impede the business of government for personal gain and money. They are weak, except for that whole money thing.

I thought it was a software problem at the start. But, by the end, it was very clearly a legal problem that involved software.

Sorry for the long post. I think that now a lot of this is over, I’m trying to figure out, retrospectively, what the heck happened.

What happened is that our government is upside down. Instead of “we the people” sending representatives to the various levels of government to get things done for us, the people we send feel that they are now in charge of US and their goal is to remain in government indefinitely. That is why they turn all their attention to raising money and are, obviously, then owned by the rich entities who lobby them and give them the money. That is why I am for all single terms. No raising money for a second, third, fifteenth term. And a nice 6 years in office would give them enough time to figure out things and get them done. Then they are GONE! And as to them being mostly lawyers… When the United States of America was set up, it was the landowners (mostly farmers) who were to give their time to participate in government. And all the times off they get throughout the year today are based upon the needs of an agricultural society. No more time off for planting, harvest or anything else! Let them work year 'round like the rest of us.

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I’m too old for this ■■■■, @Willow4.

The value in young people is that they don’t know anything about the terrible things that await them when they try to do something. Being naive is great for accomplishing things. It allows for unlimited optimism & drive. They come in all high energy and full of spunk. When people get old, they know too much to be valuable. They see the misery that awaits them if they move forward with some crazy scheme.

Senators LIKE professional lobbyists. They speak the same language as senators do and lobbyists play the power and money game much better. I learned this from a senator that I was talking to about a cause that I was involved with. “If you want to really have the attention of senators hire a professional lobbyist.”

The diabetics do have professional lobbyists. They do not bring the same resources to the table as pharma.

Some things don’t require professional lobbyists. Everyday people can’t afford one. so, its tricky. But people can pass legislation as individuals without a bunch of money or professional lobbyists. You have to play the cards that you are dealt.