Luckily we had a little later start on Tuesday, I was worn out from Nationals this weekend. When we arrived, Andy handed me 30 pages of a bill and asked me to do a “one pager” on it. This means to read the incredibly complicated bill and summarise the entire thing in less than one page. This information is then given to the team of lobbyists so they know what to tell the congressmen when they meet. It took me over an hour to actually read the bill because I had no idea what it was about. It was amending over 100 different other bills and statutes that I had to look up to see what it was really doing. It repealed a mill tax, invested in Research and development, gave tax cuts to companies that moved to NC, gave money to poor countries to invest further in community colleges. I was somewhat overwhelmed. But I trudged on and figured out what it was actually doing. Then we went down to the Legislative Office Building or the LOB and took notes at a committee meeting. Then Andy had to do some work and I had to do some real interning work. Legislators rely on lobbyists for a lot of things. They are not always the sneaky people that hold campaign contributions over the heads of congressmen to get what the want. Congressmen cannot possibly read every bill that is put in front of them, there are over 1000 bills in the house right now, and most of them are over 10 pages, it’s just not possible to understand them all. So, they rely on lobbyists to give them the “one pagers” and help explain to them the positives and negatives of the bills. The lobbyists obviously have a side that they would like the congressmen to vote for, but most of the time they provide information on both sides of the issue and then try and persuade the Congressmen to join their side. So, the lobbyists and their teams drum up this information so that the Congressmen can read it, and on Tuesday, my job was to get it to them. I had a packet of 40 copies of a 5-page brief that I had to distribute. I then had to go to each individual office of each member of the Finance committee and give them each a packet so that they could know what was in the bill and how a certain client felt about it. After that, we attended another Senate Session and I then got to leave a little early and do some blogging!