How to get your Amendments out the door

The Commission has now published its proposal. What are you going to do?

Your goal is not to sit in an internal meeting until the proposal is adopted into law or the deadline for amendments has passed.

You can issue press releases of hagiographic praise or a diatribe, but have little real external influence.

Unless you have everything you wanted in the proposal, there is only one thing you can do: work to get amendments tabled to the proposal and get them adopted into law.

This can often be done quickly.

The Commission’s proposal does not appear from the ether. You are not starting from scratch.

You will already have a ‘preferred position’, draft legal text on what you think should be in the law, a viable solution to support your preferred public policy solution, and the evidence and data to support your ask.

You’ve been engaged in lobbying the Commission since they announced the start of work on the proposal. You’ve engaged with the ISSG. The contents of the proposal are not a surprise to you.

All you have to do is update your existing position and your suggested legal text and justifications.

If you only start work once the Commission publish the proposal, you have a steep hill to climb. Unless you were knocked down by a bus and involuntarily incapacitated while the file was being adopted inside the Commission, turning up this late in the day indicates that you have been hibernating, drunk in a ditch, or are simply not well-equipped to influence EU law and policy.

I would chunk down a response to any provision into one of the three groups

And, you can hold all three positions about different parts of a proposal at the same time. There are parts you will welcome, parts you think need clarification, and some you disagree with.

You can obtain a better understanding of the meaning of the text in the proposal from:

Some of these essential documents may not accompany fast-track legislative measures.

The text should be clear. If the text has benefited from Cabinet staff, new to the policy area, trying their legal drafting skills for the first time on a Sunday at 11:30 pm, the legal clarity you are looking for may be missing.

Don’t live in a fairy tale land where you get everything you want.

In terms of omnibus measures, it is useful to remind yourself that the Commission has seen them as a tool to bring about tweaks to existing measures to deliver simplification, rather than structural policy changes.

Indeed, the Commission’s practice is to withdraw ongoing proposals, even at a late stage, if the amendments from the Council or the European Parliament amount to a significant departure from the Commission’s stated original intent.

Of course, there is nothing to stop you from seeking to bring about substantive change. The only thing you risk is having the whole proposal pulled, and a loss of good faith from many institutional players.  That will leave you hibernating in the wilderness for the next 4 years.

As a general rule, have your amendments ready within eight weeks of the proposal being published. The timeline for short omnibus proposals can be four weeks.

You need your amendments for when the Council Working Group and EP Rapporteur/Shadows start their examination of the proposal.

Don’t produce a knee-jerk response in 24 hours. It may give the game away that you already had the text.

And I’ve known of only a few organisations whose influence is so profound that Commissioners, likely Rapporteurs, and Ministers want to see their public response within 24 hours. You are unlikely to work for them.

Endless procrastination in internal expert meetings seeking an unachievable, perfect set of ‘amendments’ for all your issues is all too common. If you don’t know what your preferred outcome is, the day after the proposal comes out, it is unlikely you’ll be on time to get good quality amendments to MEPs and Member States in time to make a difference.

Your organisation will have a procedure for signing off on its positions and amendments. Follow it

It would be concerning if something as important as putting your ‘considered’ suggested amendments were prepared overnight by a committee of one, without the oversight of the leadership or members. I’ve seen it happen. It is not pretty. It leads to a lot of walking back later on.

Don’t shoot from the hip. You have one chance. You may as well make it count.

If you leave the finalisation of your position and amendments to regulatory experts, you are likely to be signing off your political death warrant. Clarity and grace will be banished from your text. Only fellow regulatory experts will understand them. Few if any decision-makers in the upcoming legislative journey will.

There are exceptions to this general rule. I know three such people.

Your position, amendments, and justifications are intended to be read by politicians, advisers, and civil servants. Some will have done their post-doc on the issue at hand, most won’t. Write clearly for the non-expert.

If you have a pre-existing position, with supporting amendment text, justification, and tangible evidence, you can be good to go the day after the proposal is published. You should get a sign-off from your organisation in advance to go ahead with this.  This can be the case when you already have an agreed position, having seen the text go through the Commission, and having an agreed position. And, if the Omnibus proposal is one provision for which you asked for action on, you are likely going to have an agreed position already.

You’ll be able to draw the basis of your amendments and the accompanying justification from your existing position papers, studies, and evidence.

It can be helpful to have a short policy memo for each set of amendments on an issue to hand over to MEPs, their Advisors, and Member State officials, to explain your request in more detail.

You’ll have developed most of these before the proposal is published. They need to be updated when the proposal is launched.

The following examples illustrate the primary types of amendments, drawn from Committee amendments.

1. New Text: Bold and Italic

Justification

Justification

As a principle, guidance for regulations, should be adopted before the entry into force of the regulation, rather than after, to avoid unnecessary implementation challenges

Sources: Link

4. Partial Deletion

.

;

Source: Link

Overview

 

So your amendments package will look something like this:

You are tabling amendments only on the Commission’s proposal.

See EP Rules of Procedure Rule 180 & Rule 181.

The Justification should be short. It is not necessary. It is a précis of the reason for the proposed legal text above.

You can see from the examples above that there is no common understanding of the term “short”.

Use plain and simple English.

It helps to have evidence to support the request in your amendment.  It is useful to have a fact sheet/policy memo for each of your amendments/set of amendments (e.g. aligned definition, recital, and body of the text).

For your policy memo, if you claim that following a practice in fisheries management used in the USA has led to an increase in fish stocks and fishermen’s income, add a table  (or 3), showing that from a given date, when a legislative measure started, fish stocks and fishermen’s income increased, and contrast that with fish stocks and fishermen’s income in a comparable EU fisheries. Ensure the data is accurate and that the sources are correctly referenced.

Here are some justifications that I’ve seen that I’d not recommend being explicit about :

Your hard work is for nothing if your amendment is not tabled and incorporated into the final law.

You’ll need to secure the support of MEPs and Member States to table the text.

I’ll write about this more another day.

I’ve found that seeking the support of a Member State or MEP whose support will undermine the mainstream majority’s support is not the best approach to getting what you want into law.

Tabling amendments to see them voted down is not the goal.