Senator Giesen

State of Georgia

To my fellow staff members,

As you all know, being a senator is my greatest accomplishment so far. I strive everyday
to make sure I represent each and every one of my constituents, as I hope you all will support me
on this. I want every citizen’s voice of this great state to be heard and understood. Large
problems in our state right now are immigration, the budget, and healthcare which I hope to
solve. These are issues for my constituents, therefor they are issues for us. I would like us to
become close and work as a team so we can fix any and all issues within the state. I want to
thank you ahead of time for all that you’re giving up to work with me and I hope that everything
we accomplish will be worth more than what you hoped. I’m not going to lie, there will be a lot
of time and effort put into this job, but what we will achieve will be greater than, hopefully, all of
the effort. I would like for you all to be able to come to me with any issue you may have, or that
you want me to address. I look forward to getting to know you all and to go into more depth
about what exactly I need from each of you.
Chief of Staff
As my Chief of Staff, I will need you to be the connection between the rest of my staff
and myself. My job can be very busy and I want to make sure I have never forgotten anyone.
My staff is extremely important to me and when I’m not able to, I would like for you to hear
everything they have to say and watch over them. You will have many responsibilities that I
know you’re more than capable of, you will be my eyes, ears, and right-hand person. I will need
you to manage my long-term legislative plan, hold staff meetings at appropriate times, speak to
groups on my behalf when I am not available, control the office budget, and make sure the office
has a set of goals, policies, and procedures.
Legislative Director
In and out of the capitol, you will be watching for potential issues and proposed laws and
reporting back to me or the Chief of Staff on what you think I need to know about the most.
Your assistants will be helping you find issues that are most important to our office like budget
and healthcare. I trust and respect all of my staff’s opinions, so if there is an issue you and your
assistants think needs to be dealt with by me, even if it is out of our main issues, I would like it to
be brought to me. I am a senator because of the people that support me and I need everyone’s
input if I am going to do the best job possible.
Legislative Assistants
Like I said above, Legislative Assistants will be working with the Legislator Director to
find the most important issues for our office. You will be finding certain issues that you think are
the most important. While your job will be a little more normal, you may have to work extra
sometimes, like on weekends or overtime during the week. I will need you to do lots of research
on laws and administrative tasks as well.
Legislative Correspondents
As a legislative correspondent, your job will be to handle communication with the people
of Georgia. As an office, we will receive a lot of letters from people regarding what they want us
to do with certain problems or just say things they want us to know. I would like for you to
handle the responses to these letters in a respectful, sympathizing manner. Although your job
may not seem big or important, you control the communication between us and our constituents
and that, to me, is the most important thing in this entire office. You will be representing all of
us and making the people feel heard and represented.
Now that I have talked about what each and every one of you will be doing individually
during this process, I would like to go into detail about what important issues we handle as a
team. For example, when handling issues in Georgia, I would like everything to remain civil and
well thought out. We should be figuring out what issues are most important to attack first and
then find a way to fix them as a team. Now, when figuring out legislative issues on the hill, I
want to go in strong and make sure we have the best argument out of anyone. I know we can’t
win every battle, but I would like to try. Our constituents are the main priority and I would like
to never let them down, every issue we deal with is to make their lives better. I will now go into
detail about the bigger issues I would like to handle immediately.
Immigration
I want to take care of every citizen in Georgia, but in order to do that they actually have
to be citizens. I love our state and would be more than happy if our state population grew, but I
do not support those coming in and not being citizens. Over 400,000 undocumented immigrants
came into our state in 2016 and compromised 4% of our total population. To make sure this
slows down I would like to continue to not allow undocumented immigrants to enroll in
Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program. Also, I would like to not allow them
access to in-state tuition for public universities.
Budget
In just a year, our state spending went from $2.5 billion to $45 billion. I would like to
decrease the amount of spending we do. Our state debt is at about $13 billion, and as hard as it is
to decrease that, I would like to try. For starters, I would like to decrease the spending on higher
education, like colleges. I feel as though it is not needed as much as K-12 schools because they
make so much of their own money through the insane prices of tuition, food, and even things as
simple as parking.
Healthcare
Against my Republican views, I support the Affordable Care Act of 2010. I understand
the struggle of not being able to afford health insurance and I think it is beneficial to get back to
where we were when Obamacare was in place. The number of people that were uninsured went
down by 29% when the ACA was in place as well as the people that were enrolled in Medicaid
went up to 1.8 million. Although I don’t think healthcare should be given out for free to
everyone, I do think it should be much more affordable and accessible because right now, it is
not.
I look forward to working with all of you to get all of these issues dealt with. I’m excited
to plan ways to speak and debate with other Congress members in ways that seems almost
impossible to debate back. I would like for us to be not just on the Republican’s side, but
everyones. It is very important to me that when finding legislative ways to solve problems, we
look at solutions from every point of view so that when we do have the opportunity to present
these new bills and ways of improvement, we have every possible outcome already thought out.
Thank you all so much.

Senator Shannon Giesen

February 21, 2021

Shannon Giesen

Reflection
This assignment was extremely fun because it was like playing make believe while also
learning so much. Throughout this assignment I realized that I was learning a lot more about
Congress and Senators than I thought I was. I got to dig deep into each specific jobs and roles
each person plays in one larger person’s job. When we learn about these things in class we learn
about specifics and how Congress works. However, during this assignment we got to
incorporate all of those things we’ve been learning with how we think a Senator would truly act.
While using the information we already knew, we learned much more throughout the assignment
by looking up specifics about the government, laws, and the state. I personally think I know way
more about Georgia and its government then I ever thought I would so that is also very cool.