Hello, my name is Ema and I have been drowned by legislation.
This weekend is Maryland Student Legislature’s Spring Leadership Training Institute and Interim Assembly conference, which will be held at McDaniel College. At this event last year, I declared my candidacy for Attorney General. This past week, I have been wondering what exactly I was thinking and why I thought it was a great idea.
As AG, my biggest responsibility is legislation, which is the meat of everything we do at MSL. Our end goal is to debate meaningful and quality legislation that inspires thoughtful debate. For this to be achieved, we have to have quality bills.
I’m a grammar nut and I have a relatively good eye for formatting. Generally, upon first looking at a bill, I can catch a lot of formatting errors, though I try and give each piece at least two read throughs to catch everything. Additionally, I have to go to the Maryland State Code and find the section of code being amended to make sure that the bill actually makes sense–there have been acts submitted that change imaginary pieces of the state code!
I was worried about this event because we didn’t have very much legislation submitted. Our next conference is Annual Session in Annapolis, so a lot of people save their best bills for that conference–understandably, since debating in the actual state house is quite an experience. To fill gaps, however, I wrote three pieces of legislation the night before we sent them to print. I’m really hoping that I didn’t make any huge errors in grammar or formatting!
The majority of my work is over now, thankfully. I get to sit back and enjoy the conference. As Parliamentarian, I’m not actually allowed to debate–the drawback of my job–however, I know that others will formulate great arguments for and against these bills. I’m excited!
What a polished bill looks like from the outside.
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