The art of keeping the Legislature moving during the session
When Rep. Jennifer Dailey-Provost was elected minority whip of the Utah House late last year, her predecessor gave her a present to mark the transition — an actual whip.
The gift from now-Sen. Karen Kwan hangs on the Salt Lake City Democrat’s wall as a light-hearted nod to the title, which comes from a fox-hunting expression, “whipper-in,” according to a history of party whips on a congressional website. The reference is to the hunting team member responsible for keeping dogs from straying during a chase, sometimes by cracking a whip on the ground next to the hounds.
In the political sense, the traditional job of whips is to facilitate communication between the party’s leadership and members, help bring bills to the floor, round up members for votes and whip up support for key legislation.
“It’s an effort to control the chaos a lot of the time,” Dailey-Provost said of the job.
Her counterpart in the Senate is Kathleen Riebe, D-Cottonwood Heights. The majority whips are Rep. Jeff Moss, R-Saratoga Springs, and Sen. Ann Millner, R-Ogden.
A whip has to “work the body,” Dan Hemmert, a former Utah Senate majority whip, said.
“What that means is just go talk to other members of the Legislature and see where they are on issues,” said Hemmert, who now is a partner in Hemmco, a government affairs and political strategy consulting firm. “Of course, you’re trying to drive them toward a certain outcome on those issues but really what it comes down to is that willingness to go have the conversations with the various members of the body.”
Democrats are far outnumbered in the 104-member Legislature, which has 29 senators and 75 representatives. With a Republican-Democrat split of 23-6 in the Senate and 61-14 in the House, the GOP has a veto-proof supermajority in both chambers.
Cracking the whip or herding cats?
Despite the imbalance, the whips say they have good relationships with legislators across the aisle.
“The reality is — and people don’t fully appreciate this — we vote together with the Democrats about 90% of the time,” Moss said. “We even come together on a lot of big issues. There are a few that obviously are very partisan-type issues. But I would say on the majority of issues, we definitely try to bring them in the loop and have conversations. We talk to them as much as we talk to each other.”
Moss said there is a perception that a whip uses heavy pressure to get key votes but that’s not the approach he takes. Instead, he makes clear what the leadership priorities are and acts as a facilitator, educator and listener.
“We’re trying to understand what each of our colleagues’ perceptions are on different issues,” he said. “Sometimes it’s they don’t know enough about the bill or they’ve heard things about a bill that maybe weren’t accurate. Sometimes it’s helping them understand better why there’s a need for a certain policy or a certain funding request. Other times it’s just trying to bring people together.”
Moss said there’s a saying on the Hill that there are three numbers that matter —38, 15 and 1.
“You’ve got to get 38 members of the House, 15 members of the Senate and the governor to pass anything,” he said. “Sometimes that’s easy. We all pretty much agree on something and we’re able to run it through and it doesn’t have a lot of problems getting passed.”
Minor tweaks can move some bills forward but the effort to reach a consensus on other legislation can take a long time, said Moss, who jokingly describes his job as that of a cat herder. He cited as an example this year’s House Bill 215 to give teachers pay raises while also funding scholarships for private schools and home-schooling.
Rep. Candice Pierucci, R-Riverton, had sponsored the Hope Scholarship Bill in 2022 to create a school voucher program paid for with taxpayer dollars. Despite several changes to the legislation in response to criticism that the legislation would siphon money from public schools, the Utah House voted it down.
The 2023 session was different for HB215, also sponsored by Pierucci.
The bill was publicly distributed on Jan. 16, one day before the session started, then went to the House Education Committee. The committee voted on Jan. 19 to send the measure to the full House, which passed it the next day. Next, HB215 cleared the Senate Education Committee on Jan. 23 and the full Senate approved it Jan. 26 on a second required vote. Gov. Spencer Cox signed the bill on Jan. 28.
“We did it!,” Pierucci tweeted on Jan. 26. “HB 215 has passed the Utah State Legislature with a supermajority and is on its way to @GovCox to sign!”
Moss said a lot of work was done on the bill in last year’s session and also during the interim.
“Even this session, there was a lot of iteration that was happening,” he said. “It wasn’t until the very end where a group of our colleagues came together and said we don’t love this bill but if you could make these three or four changes, this could get on board.”
Moss added, “To me, what I loved about it is the changes that they brought made the bill a better bill.”
Facilitating lawmakers’ work
Opponents disagree the changes made HB215 acceptable. They objected to trying teacher salary increases being tied to vouchers and complained the legislation was rushed through.
They also point out the Legislature, with a Republican majority, passed a voucher bill in 2007 but the legislation was overturned with 62 percent voter approval in a citizen referendum.
Darlene McDonald, a Democrat who ran last year for Utah’s 4th Congressional District seat, noted in a Salt Lake Tribune opinion piece that the Legislature has a veto-proof and initiative-proof supermajority and wrote HB215 “is a demonstration of how extreme political and ideological divisions result in harmful policy solutions that serve a private good.”
But Millner said that in her role as majority whip in the Senate, she serves lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, making sure legislation is considered in the correct order and facilitating everybody being able to get their work done.
“I ask every senator, whether they are the Democratic or Republican, to give me their list of bills and their priority for it,” she said.
The job gets intense near the end of the session, when Millner runs the House board because the Senate bills are being considered there and Moss manages the Senate Board.
In the days before the Legislature adjourns, “you are trying to help every single senator move their priority bills through appropriately, and not drop something along the way,” Millner said.
“I run back and forth between the House and the Senate a significant amount during that last week of the session, trying to coordinate work with everybody, make sure we keep everything on track,” she said. “The pace steps up as the session goes on.”
Millner said whips need leadership, coordination, organization, and communication skills. She enjoys having the big picture of what’s going on in the Senate and helping lawmakers accomplish their goals. When legislators have disagreements and see bills differently, she tries to get all the players to the table to focus on finding a solution, she said.
“We know we’re not always going to agree on every issue but if we work together on one issue, then we move onto the next issue, maybe we’ll disagree on an issue but then move on to the next one and we may agree on that,” she said.
Millner said the legislative body is small enough to work well together.
“All of us have the same commitment to wanting to do what’s good for Utah citizens,” she said. “Our goal is to try to make good decisions and support the people of the state of Utah. We have a common mission that makes a real difference, and then you just have to find ways to deliver on trying to make that happen.”
Speaking up and making a difference
Riebe said because her party is a superminority with only six Democrats in the Senate, her job is a little bit different than the traditional minority whip job. Caucus members all represent districts in Salt Lake County and their votes usually align because they have the same kind of constituency, she said.
“All of us believe in reproductive rights and all of us believe in public schools and fair wages and that’s what makes this whip job super easy because we are so cohesive and we are behind those core values of being a Democrat,” she said.
Riebe — who in addition to communicating with a network at the Capitol as whip works with the state Democratic Party — also said that “because we are so small, we make sure that we are working together to move the message forward of what we want.”
She said caucus members are not pushed to vote one way or the other on many bills and when someone does split from the others, it’s because the legislation impacts that senator’s specific community a little bit differently.
“Even if we have one that doesn’t vote with us, we’re not going to affect the outcome, unfortunately,” she said.
But members of the minority caucus can move smaller bills that make a difference or take out language from a bill that Democrats mostly like to make it better, according to Riebe.
“We can also speak up,” she said. “We always try to get on record, saying that this is the bill that came through but this is not what we stand for. Hopefully, that will resonate. Gov. (Gary) Herbert said that was the job of the minority, to push back, and so we try to push back and we try to push back in a way that will help us move forward with relationships but also make the opposite point of view known.”
Putting heart and soul into legislation
Dailey-Provost said being a good listener, managing a lot of issues at the same time and “really trying to tap into the subtleties that come with politics” are among the attributes of a good whip. All Democratic leaders in the House do whatever they can to support caucus members in their efforts to pass legislation, she said.
“When you’re working on talking to people about a piece of legislation and looking for support for legislation, there are 104 legislators in our body, so there are 104 different ways to have a conversation about a policy,” she said.
Caucus leaders bring their strengths and policy interests to the position of whip, Dailey-Provost said. In addition to her whip duties, she is focusing on the budget.
Being in a superminority and having only a 45-day session to get everything done are the hardest parts of the job, she said.
“Really putting your heart and soul into a piece of legislation and then it not getting passed because the clock runs out is always a little bit soul-crushing at the end of every session,” Dailey-Provost said. “It can’t be all easy and fun.”
She said there’s a misconception that because the Democrats are a superminority, they don’t get anything done and don’t have any influence.
“I would push back on that,” Dailey-Provost said. “I think because we try really hard to have a respectful, collegial relationship that there’s mutual respect. We don’t get every win that we want but we certainly are not without a voice. Our minority leadership team has a really, really good working relationship with our majority leadership team. That doesn’t always transcend politics but we can’t let it devolve into nastiness and partisanship just because we don’t get everything we want.”
