Legislative Lingo (transcript)

Today’s topic is one of my favorites, legislative lingo.

It probably doesn’t come as much of a surprise that my colleagues and I, those who work in and around California’s state capital, use a number of different terms or lingo to describe different aspects of the California legislative process. I’ve tried to compile a short list of some of the more common terms used in the California legislative process.

I’ll cover a few of the terms here, and the rest are covered in the podcast. The first one is “41st senator.” There are 40 members of the California State Senate who are duly elected to represent the 40 Senate districts across the state of California, about 950,000 constituents each.

Due to the power of some of the staff in the upper house of the Legislature, there are a few staffers, particularly with committees or leadership offices, who are often viewed as being almost as powerful, if not as powerful, as some of those elected members of the State Senate. That’s why we use the term, 41st Senator.

Blue pencil. The term blue pencil is used to refer to the Governor in the State of California has an ability to line‑item veto, specific items of appropriations, either in the budget bill itself, which has numerous thousands of appropriations or individual appropriation bills.

The President of the United States does not have line‑item veto authority, but California’s Governor is one of those states that provides it. The line‑item veto authority can only reduce or eliminate items of appropriation. The Governor does not have authority to increase items of appropriation.

Gut and amend. It sounds rather ominous, doesn’t it? This is when amendments to a bill remove the current contents of the bill in their entirety. It’s gutted ‑‑ the bill is gutted ‑‑ and it’s amended, that is the language is replaced with entirely different provisions that are unrelated to the original contents of the bill. That’s a gut and amend.

Again, I cover many more terms in today’s podcast. Thanks for listening.