Civic Participation and Community Action Sourcebook
Section
Two
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Civic Participation and Community Action Sourcebook |
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Section
Two
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Walking Students Through a Legislative Process
by Paul Morse
In all of my GED classes, I try to illustrate the connection between history and current events, and encourage students to consider the complex tensions between American individualism and social justice. My aim in this particular class was to bring the legislative process alive by using it to learn about and debate real issues.
We started by reading an article on some proposed gun control legislation, which started this way:
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Lawmakers look to limit
guns: Bill addresses restraining order issue New Hampshire lawmakers are trying to decide on a bill that automatically would take away guns from people who have restraining orders against them. . . . The bill would apply to temporary and permanent orders. An existing federal law already makes it illegal for people with permanent restraining orders against them to have guns. The bill passed the House earlier this year and now is being considered by the Senate Judiciary Committee. “And that’s where it should stop,” says Christopher Ferris, vice president of Gun Owners of New Hampshire. He says such a law should apply only to people charged with a crime. He also believes the person should get some sort of hearing before any guns can be taken away. “We believe there’s enough laws on the books currently and that enforcement of current laws will protect victims of violent crime,” Ferris said. But the new law could make a difference, says Linda Griebsch, public policy director for the New Hampshire Coalition Against Domestic Abuse and Sexual Violence. Of the seven domestic violence-related deaths in New Hampshire this year, six were murder-suicides and all involved guns. Griebsch said the most recent, a murder-suicide in Dover, involved a woman who had taken out a restraining order against her killer.
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I then asked students to list questions that the article raised for them. These included:
• What’s the difference between a bill and a law?
• What does “mandate” mean?
• How does an issue make it to the legislature?
• What’s the process for getting a restraining order?
• How does a bill get from a committee to the full legislature?These initial questions provided me with a great opportunity to discuss how a bill becomes law, the workings, divisions, and size of the New Hampshire General Court (House) and State Senate, and cover a lot of important vocabulary words like “lobbying,” “judiciary,” “constitutional,” “coalition,” and “loophole.”
Next I informed the students that they would have the chance to become the Senate Judiciary Committee and would need to vote whether to send the bill out of committee to the full senate or “kill” it. I asked them to generate all the questions they felt they needed to have answered before they could vote.
An exciting discussion followed. Two women in the class and one man had found it necessary to get a restraining order issued against someone threatening them on at least one occasion in their own lives.
Students decided to vote either “yea” or “nay” on paper ballots after a short debate. The ballots were then counted and the results proved surprising given the dynamics of the prior discussion. Six students voted to “kill’ the bill and four were in favor.
We discussed the reasons for the vote results. Two students said they needed more information and might have voted differently if some of the questions they generated could be answered first. Others were strongly in favor because of their experience with domestic violence or their sympathies for victims. Two of the opponents felt it was an attack on the right to bear arms. One student worried about the police abusing their power if the law passed. The older students, for the most part, were most supportive.
Having “killed” the bill, our journey through the legislature had to end at this point. Many students stated that they felt it was a short amount of time to consider something so important. We were left to consider how difficult it is to move a bill, successfully, through the entire process, and to ponder how much actual discussion and debate underlie most legislative decisions.
Paul Morse taught pre-GED and GED at Second Start in Concord, NH.
