Weeks three and four with the Legislative Division were not as exciting as one and two, but I am still extremely happy with my choice of residency. At the start of my third week with the Treasurer I was given the responsibility of analyzing a piece of legislation the Treasurer has an interest in. I had to read the bill and write a short summary for internal staff to use. It required more work than I thought it would, as I had to contact people outside of our office for information about the legislation. After sending it to be reviewed by staff, I recieved some good constructive criticism that I was happy to have. Hopefully I be able to write more analyses in the future without much oversight from staff members and that are helpful to staffers looking for the basic information about legislation.

The Capitol has been incredibly quiet post-State of the State address. It seems everyone is focusing on the election, those running and staffers alike. I have always known that political jobs were often contingent on election results, but it becomes more real when the people you work with talk about possibly not having a job after the primary or general election.

Any talk that does occur within the election is likely centered around the election. This primary season seems to be more controversial than past elections and it is exciting to be in Springfield for it all. I'm interested to see if there is any change in dynamic due to who wins. (For example, IF Quinn would lose in the primary, will the legislature act any differently with a lame-duck governor?)

I get a chance to see the results of another CLP fellow, Dan, daily when I read the Capitol Fax blog. New to reading the blog, I have discovered that you can find just about anything you want to know about Illinois politics on the blog. Everyone in my office looks at the blog on a daily basis, on busy days just scanning headlines to see if there is anything that would affect our office. On days with more down time, the stories posted on Capitol Fax are usually very interesting, especially with the election around the corner. By the way, great work Dan!

One of the responsibilities that fell on both myself and Brittany (the other intern) last week was to "clean up" a piece of legislation the Treasurer is introducing. Our office originally created a version of the bill but then decided to make variations. Before a bill can be introduced into the House or Senate, it must first be taken to the Legislative Reference Bureau (LRB) in the Capitol to be drafted into the format officially used by Legislature. Every single bill must be drafted in this format and that office is the only one with the correct computer software to turn a draft of a bill into something that can be used by the Legislature. Also, the office must protect the integrity of the documents and for that reason does not issue the documents electronically (i.e. In a PDF file that can be opened on any computer). The bill is posted on the website and distributed on paper instead. So, once we wanted to make changes to our already drafted bill, it had to be scanned in and then modified. This proved to be a formatting nightmare- and a problem the interns had to solve. The bill was hard to read and very confusing once all of our changes were in place. Also, the bill had to be fixed before it could be submitted to LRB because the office would have not accepted the mess we created. It took Brittany and myself over a full day of work to get the bill into a format that was far from perfect, but at least intelligible. Everyone in our office seemed to really appreciate our hard work on getting the bill fixed.

The week of February 1-5 will likely be an exciting one for Illinois and Springfield. The primary election on Tuesday and the House reconvenes on Wednesday. I'm excited to see what it brings!