West Virginia’s 60-day legislative session can seem like a particularly chaotic affair, with hundreds of legislators, staff, and citizens rushing in different directions, all trying to accomplish different and sometimes contradictory goals.
At the Capitol, there are two brave souls whose job it is to bring order to this chaos: the Clerks of the House and Senate.
If you look closely at the legislative chaos, you’ll see that it’s governed by a set of rules. These are called Robert’s Rules and they lay out the legislative process and ensure that each voice at the legislature is weighted equally.
The job of the clerk is, essentially, to be the keeper of the legislative process. They make sure that every piece of proposed legislation moves through the process according to the rules and record its progress along the way.
Each chamber of the legislature has a clerk. In the House of Delegates, the clerk is Steve Harrison and in the Senate, it’s Lee Cassis. They’re responsible for providing impartial support for the legislative process in a number of ways including:
As the official record keepers of the legislature, they are also a wealth of information. Here are some questions that the clerks can be particularly helpful with:
It takes a lot of work to make sure that the legislative process functions properly. While the clerks aren’t the only ones making sure that each voice is fairly weighted, they play a key role in making sure that the rules of order are followed and that information is available to legislators and citizens alike.
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