Committee Versus Floor Lobbying

Should you tackle committee lobbying differently than you do floor lobbying? Lobbying is lobbying, after all. While there are certainly some similarities between the two venues, there are also some important differences between lobbying legislation in a policy or fiscal committee, or on the Senate or Assembly Floors.

In lobbying committees, the focus is on a smaller number of legislators and their staff (although the Senate and Assembly Budget Committees are quite large in size!). The target, of course, is to get a majority of the committee members to agree with your position, just as you need a majority or sometimes a higher threshold on either Floor for certain types of bills.

When your bill is in committee, you spend time working with the committee staff (both majority and minority party consultants) on the bill language, and perhaps whether any amendments are necessary or appropriate.  And you work with the consultants on their respective analyses, providing relevant information and answering their questions in the hope those analyses will reflect your support or opposition comments.

The lobbyist also needs to determine what key points he or she will raise in their brief testimony before the policy committee. Committee consultants may be able to shed light on the chair’s recommendation or the key points that may be persuasive to their committee members. You can also fine tune your main arguments prior to the hearing, primarily by making succinct comments in your office visits leading up to the hearing. You might to consider asking friendly legislators to ask questions of your witnesses to elicit additional points that can be made.

When your bill is in the fiscal committee, your focus obviously turns to the potential fiscal consequences of the bill, minimizing the potential impacts if you are a supporter and maximizing the projected revenue impact if you are an opponent. That can usually be addressed in a sentence or two if public comment happens to be made at the usually brief hearing in the fiscal committee.

For committee hearings, you will want to determine who will be assigned to lobby the individual committee members, coordinating and tracking the outcomes of those visits. And, in preparation for the hearing, decide who the main witnesses are who will be providing the brief, substantive testimony. It will also be important to line-up additional witnesses who will express their support for your position (referred to as “Me Too” testimony in the California Capitol).

When a bill is on the Floor of the Senate or Assembly, the lobbyist’s focus then turns to the entire house, with the vote threshold in mind (in about 90% of all bills that is a simple majority vote, 41 in the Assembly and 21 in the Senate). A good indicator of the upcoming Floor vote will be based on earlier committee votes. Since less than 1% of all bills fail passage on either Floor, the outcome is generally a foregone conclusion. Nonetheless, it is still important to “make the rounds” (i.e., visit legislative offices) on a bill prior to the Floor vote.

Because you may have to get a count from most of the 40-Member Senate or 80-Member Assembly, it is often helpful to enlist one or more colleagues to help divide that workload. Some visits may be based upon party affiliation; some may be based on floors in the Swing Space; and, some do visits based upon individual relationships with legislative offices. Whichever approach is taken, make sure all appropriate offices are covered in your pre-Floor lobbying efforts.

For Floor efforts, the primary work will be to determine who will be assigned to lobby the legislators for the Floor vote, coordinating those visits and then tracking their outcomes. You might also consider asking one or more friendly legislators to speak in support of your position on the bill.