When you want to write legislation, there's a specific process that you should follow. A good resolution takes about eight hours to write; a good bill takes about 12 hours to write. There is no way to get around this time investment. Writing sloppy legislation will produce sloppy results and will result in a sloppy, unproductive process.

This is a collaborative process!

Legislating is a collaborative process, and everyone seldom gets what they want. The process is full of compromises, negotiations, tricks, and amendments; but at the end of the tunnel the process is so rewarding. But never get too attached to a piece of legislation—there are a variety of reasons that legislation can die. Sometimes the legislation just wasn't needed; other times the issues was resolved without the legislation needing to pass; sometimes you have the right piece of legislation at the wrong moment. It's a complicated, human process filled with human foibles.

The Broad Strokes

We can broadly divide the legislative process into five steps:

Formulation and research;
Drafting;
Introduction;
Negotiation; and
Implementation.

Formulation and Research

The policy formulation stage

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