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Comment by jonaldomo | Hacker News Reader

TIL that you can submit bills and not be a politician.

I dug into it out of curiosity, and I don't believe that's technically true, but is sort-of true in practice. Only members of the legislature may formally introduce bills. But, Kansas, like some other states (especially those influenced by popular-democracy principles of the progressive era), has developed a convention where legislators often convey bills to a relevant committee when requested to by a constituent. In that case they submit the bill but decline to sponsor it, to indicate that they're just conveying it.

Here's the relevant section from the Kansas Handbook of Legislative Procedure (http://www.kslegislature.org/li/m/pdf/kansas_legislative_pro...):

16. Who May Introduce a Bill.

Any member or any standing committee, an interim committee of either house, and certain statutory committees may introduce a bill. Sometimes bills are introduced by two or more members (of the same house) as joint sponsors. All regular appropriation bills are introduced by the Appropriations/Ways and Means Committees. Bills sometimes are introduced by a member or committee at the request of a constituent with the notation “By Request” appearing after the author’s name on the printed bill and in the journal. A “By Request” designation often suggests that the member or committee who introduced the bill is not necessarily an advocate for it.

It happens at the federal level too. Lobbyist groups write the bills themselves and submit them to members of Congress in closed door meetings. Congress can then edit the bill, but they often just introduce it as-is. We only know this because people have leaked the Lobbyists version of bills and compared them to the ones introduced by Congress.

Yeah, in practice I think it's converged to a similar sort of thing, though the Kansas version does have better-intentioned origins. Rather than having a bill covertly written by lobbyists and then sponsored by a Congressman who claims to be advocating it but actually had little to do with its drafting (as happens at the federal level), the original idea of some of these state-level practices was to open up the legislature to citizen-proposed legislation. Some states (like California) went all the way with a robust citizen-initiative system where citizens can directly propose legislation that has to receive a vote. Others developed conventions more like Kansas's, where the norm was that legislators are supposed to forward reasonable legislation for a vote even if they don't personally advocate it, and this was done quite openly ("I'm forwarding this bill by request of so-and-so"). So the response to a citizen asking the legislator to sponsor a bill becomes three- rather than two-valued: the legislator could draft and sponsor legislation in their own name to that end; could reject it entirely and refuse to introduce anything along those lines; or third, they could pass the citizen-written bill along for a vote as-is, without working on or endorsing it themselves.

I doubt it really works like that in practice anymore, if it ever did (my guess is that, if you aren't important, your chances of having a bill you send be seriously considered are pretty small), but I can see why it was an attractive idea.

I doubt it really works like that in practice anymore...

Yeah TFA makes pretty clear that in this case the bill was written by the greasiest lobbyist in Kansas.

A huge number of bills are done on the "Written by industry, submitted by sympathetic politician" model. It's pretty much ALEC's whole deal, and they're really good at it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Legislative_Exchange_...

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