Complex sentence: Observers of the legislature were predicting a similar fate for the Proposed Code in the 1988 legislative session; however, as lead author of the bill, Bagert had been conducting frequent meetings with the competing forces who had doomed the codes of prior years.
Split into simpler sentences: Observers of the legislature were predicting a similar fate for the Proposed Code in the 1988 legislative session. However, as lead author of the bill, Bagert had been conducting frequent meetings with the competing forces who had doomed the codes of prior years.