Of Laws and Sausages

Of Laws and Sausages

A week ago I traveled to the Ilinois Capitol to witness an Energy Committee Hearing. Though I’ve lived in Illinois most of my life, I’d never been to the Capitol before.

It has a special smell, I found—of sugar, of perfume that’s lingered in the air past its prime, of anxious people’s sweat, and of hard liquor. I was amazed, frankly, by the odors. They made the place instantly personal in a way I did not expect. My nose sensed immediately that people with great hopes and fears walk the halls of the Capitol. People who fortify themselves for the effort as best they can.

And as I waited with my friends to discover if the Senate’s fracking moratorium bill would be discussed in the Energy Committee hearing on that day, I saw that many others were waiting, too. I saw many hushed but intense conversations, many carefully dressed people looking for the word that would propel their opinion forward, and quickly realized that the real work of creating laws happens in the hallways outside the hearing rooms. Speculation, persuasion, deflection, denial—all these approaches made the hallway buzz.

And when my friends and I finally entered the hearing room, I already felt like I’d been in the backroom of the butcher shop on a day when sausage with, perhaps, not the freshest ingredients was being made. Just before I entered the hearing room, someone had whispered to me, “Look, there he is. The leader of the pro-fracking supporters.” The man slipped into the hearing room a few minutes before us, but I had time to take in his appearance.

In his brown wool suit, he looked as if someone must have helped him to stuff those huge arms of his into his sleeves. His shoulders strained at the armholes, and the suit gapped in the front, unable to encase his barrel chest. The skin of his neck topped his shirt collar with folds of flesh and his thick neck and closely cropped head jutted in front of him as if ready to bounce a soccer ball to a waiting opponent.

In the performing arts world such a man walking into a casting call would have been pegged for the role of a hit man or a construction foreman. But in Springfield, this man smoothly entered the hearing room and took a seat near the front.

And then it was time for us to enter the hearing room. As my friends talked with each other about how the moratorium bill might fare, I confess I played the rube. I took in the baroque ceiling decorations, the red leather chairs, the preponderance of carved mahogany, and the tired and, frankly, bored-looking senators presiding over the hearing.

And then the man who looked like a fistful of over-stuffed sausages slid to the front of the hearing room. He went right up to the fellow running the Energy Committee and whispered in his ear. I don’t think my friends noticed this because they were still receiving fresh information from their contacts in the room, but being the inexperienced one, I was, frankly, amazed at this man’s utter confidence that the committee chairman would want to hear his hushed words. When the man in the tight brown suit was finished with his message, he again took a seat at the front of the room.

Then some time elapsed, but finally the chairman announced that the fracking moratorium bill would not come for a vote during the hearing, and instead was to be shuttled to something called a “special issue” sub-committee. No explanation was provided so we might know what a “special issue” sub-committee was designed to address. The chairman simply and quietly announced that this would occur and my friends signaled to me that it was time for us to leave. We would not have the opportunity to provide testimony to the committee about the dangers of fracking because the committee would not be discussing the fracking moratorium bill.

And that was it. Somehow in the moments before the Energy Committee hearing began, the fracking moratorium bill was shunted into the obscurity of a sub-committee process. Not good news for those of us who were hoping to secure for Illinois a period of time in which to study fracking’s effects on our air, water, land, people and other life forms attempting to survive within the borders of our state.

How are citizens to cope with a system like this one? And who exactly is calling the shots in this fracking law process?