Sick The Legislature Syndrome And How to Avoid It Charles Mahtesian One quick look at the Minnesota legislature tells you that it is a state-of-theart political institution, all fitted out for the interactive democracy of the next century. There is gavel-to-gavel televised coverage of every session, something very few states provide. Voters can use the Internet to peruse bill texts and bill status, committee schedules, press releases and biographies of the members. Every Friday, Session Weekly, an informative and readable journal published by the nonpartisan House Public Information Office, reports on the highlights of each week's activity. All of this is provided to the public free of charge. The same brief glance at Tennessee's legislature suggests that the Volunteer State is, one might say, a little amateurish. There is no televised coverage, and there is no Internet site. Tennessee is one of only two states that don't have one. In Nashville, they brag about how they rank 48th out of 50 in per capita legislative branch expenditures. In fact, Tennessee spends less than half of what Minnesota spends--despite being home to a half-million more residents. Over the past couple of decades, while Minnesota was winning national praise for innovations such as public campaign financing and gender pay equity, Tennessee's legislature went almost completely unnoticed until recently, when frivolous arguments over a Ten Commandments resolution and the teaching of creationism attracted nationwide ridicule. It probably won't surprise you to learn that last year, one of these two bodies conducted an efficient, productive and thoroughly civilized legislative session, something it has done every single year during the 1990s. Or that the other has sunk into a humiliating morass of bitter partisanship and personal scandal. What will surprise you is which of these legislatures is which. In the past four years, voters in Minnesota have been bombarded with tawdry tales of errant members nabbed for shoplifting, fraud, drunk driving, spousal assault and spreading false rumors about constituents. A scandal surrounding the misuse of state phone card privileges led to the resignation of the House majority leader and the eventual ouster of the Speaker in 1993. All in all, lawmakers there have exhibited a stunning knack for discrediting
their institution, accumulating a body of offenses that equals, if it does not surpass, some of the more egregious transgressions of their colleagues in other states. By last fall, all sense of collegiality had vanished from the Minnesota House. Since nearly all of the turmoil had occurred on the Democratic side of the aisle, Republicans took the opportunity to portray the ethical chaos as the arrogant excesses of an entrenched majority. Governor Arne Carlson's spokeswoman herself openly mused about the "thieves and drunks" of the state legislature. Meanwhile, the Democratic caucus itself was in full-scale revolt against its speaker, the combatively partisan Irv Anderson. Two of Anderson's fellow Democrats took their criticism to the editorial pages of the St. Paul Pioneer Press, blaming Anderson for gridlock and calling for his removal. Within a week of last November's elections, he was unceremoniously dumped from the speakership. As for the voters, they apparently found the Republican tactics almost as unappealing as the scandals themselves. Democrats actually survived the election with one more House seat than they had before it. But the voters made their feelings clear. They not only stayed home from the polls in record numbers, but overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure permitting recall of virtually anyone holding elected office. The entire episode suggests one compelling lesson: If the Minnesota legislature is the state of the art, there must be something wrong with the art. In Tennessee, meanwhile, the year concluded as inconspicuously as it began. There were few surprises at the ballot box, and legislators' personal foibles remained largely out of the public eye. The 1996 legislative product was steady, if unspectacular; nearly all interested parties received a little of what they wanted with a minimum of rancor. Republican Governor Don Sundquist's welfare reform package passed, but with more than 40 amendments. Business and labor both claimed small victories on workers' compensation. State employees received a raise that was not quite what they asked for, but about what they could reasonably expect. "We all don't get what we want with every piece of legislation that passes," says House Speaker Jimmy Naifeh. "We need to remember that half a loaf is better than none." In short, it was a typical year in the Tennessee legislature, displaying the balance that has enabled it to compile a consistently impressive record of substantive work throughout the 1990s. While most states were engaged in futile hand-wringing over exploding Medicaid expenditures, Tennessee created TennCare, the nation's most ambitious Medicaid overhaul. Long
before higher education accountability issues were on the national radar, Tennessee established a performance-based funding mechanism that linked dollars to outcomes--the first of its kind in the nation. Over the course of the decade, the Volunteer State has enacted a wide-ranging K-12 education package and comprehensive campaign finance, ethics and lobbying legislation. And it has done all that while holding to a level of comity and bipartisanship that is foreign to most chambers these days. "In Tennessee," says Senate Speaker John Wilder, who by statute also holds the position of lieutenant governor, "we don't have to shut down the government before we sit down and talk." Even under Sundquist, a more partisan figure than any of his recent predecessors, the Republican governor and the Democratic legislature have exhibited a pronounced ability to coexist. Of all the freshman Republican governors who came into office in 1994 facing sizable Democratic opposition, Sundquist arguably has registered the most success in enacting his agenda. That is no coincidence. Because while Tennessee's legislative system is far from perfect, it speaks to the value of simple qualities such as civility that have been largely lost in the legislatures that have rushed headlong toward professionalism. The Minnesotas and the Californias of American politics aren't laughing at Tennessee anymore. What they want to know is how they can get some of that old-fashioned decency back. California, the flagship of legislative professionalism, remains the most dramatic exhibit. Stable leadership is nonexistent there. Within the last year and a half alone, five different speakers have held the House gavel. The sense of angry partisanship reaches beyond chamber doors and into the electoral arena, where opposition members are targeted for recall for the slightest provocation. Within the capitol, the halls are choked with representatives of special interests--1,100 registered lobbyists at last count-all narrowly focused and a constant reminder of the high stakes of modern legislating. Not all of the 10 state bodies classified as "professional" by the National Conference of State Legislatures bear all of these symptoms. But enough of them do to make the pattern unmistakable. Professionalism creates an institution filled with able, full-time legislators, talented staff and generous resources. And yet many of these institutions become hopelessly polarized, from the back benches to the rostrum. It isn't difficult to find professionalized legislatures elsewhere in the country that have shown
symptoms of the Minnesota problem in one way or another. In Pennsylvania, for example, the Senate shut down for much of 1993 because the result of a single special election threatened the razor-thin Democratic numerical advantage. Few were surprised by this tactic: The previous year, Republicans had pulled a similar stunt for fear one of their own would switch party allegiance. It is the cutthroat competition for control in a close partisan situation that explains why, during the past decade in Pennsylvania, ethically tainted members from both sides of the aisle have routinely escaped discipline. In New York, sharp-elbowed partisanship between legislative leaders virtually guarantees an annual budget standoff. Since a threesome comprised of the governor, the Democratic Assembly speaker and the Republican Senate leader dominates in Albany, there is no effective mechanism for resolving the partisan differences. Last year, New York set a new record by delivering a budget that was 103 days past due. Illinois is not much different in its partisan ferocity. In 1996, for example, when Republican Governor Jim Edgar offered a wide-ranging school finance package amidst an all-out GOP effort to retain its recently acquired House majority, his proposal was immediately rejected and scorned by his own party. The potential political consequences, it seems, were too great. And Democrats were too close to winning back the House for Republicans to want to take the risk. (As it turned out, the Democrats won the House back anyway.) Meanwhile, there are signs that the "sick legislature" syndrome is spreading to states that have been relatively free of it thus far. In Florida where Republicans took control in 1996 for the first time since Reconstruction, Democrats insisted on challenging the credentials of six victorious GOP legislators. Republicans, in turn, registered two challenges of their own. During the legislature's organizational session, a group of lawmakers angrily objected not only to the content of the opening prayer but to the composition of the veterans' delegation that led the Pledge of Allegiance. The irony was hard to miss. Only recently Florida had been recognized as the 10th and latest state to join the ranks of fully professionalized legislative bodies. Not everyone in the Minnesota legislature accepts the notion that the onslaught of professionalism is at the root of the recent years' embarrassments. But an increasing number of members, past and present, are beginning to acknowledge that professionalism, partisanship and incivility are linked to each other in some unholy way. "The legislature was less
partisan when it was more of a part-time body," says John Brandl, a former leader in the Minnesota House and Senate who now teaches at the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute in Minneapolis. "People are becoming so dependent on their position in the legislature and so self-protective that they can't see the institution for what it is." There is no simple explanation for how Minnesota got that way, but there is a history, and it stretches back at least as far as 1979--the year the Minnesota House was split evenly between the two parties. Democrats, seizing on campaign practice violations against newly elected Republican Representative Robert Pavlak, moved to expel him, then took advantage of his absence to seize control of the chamber, 67 votes to 66. To a Republican caucus comprised mainly of first-term members, it was a jarring introduction. And they have never forgotten it. "That was my eyeopening to Minnesota legislative politics," says Steve Sviggum, the current GOP House leader. "That was the absolute worst power politics I've ever seen." Over the course of the 1980s, with party control up for grabs, those same tensions hardened into a conviction on both sides that they were entitled to pursue their by goals any means necessary. "As each party assumed power," political scientist Royce Hanson wrote in 1989, "it used its organizational and procedural power to humiliate the minority, producing a thirst for revenge among the members who could hardly wait for their turn in power to get even." The growing partisan hostilities of the Minnesota House are reflected in simple physical changes. At one time members chose their seats on the House floor by seniority, regardless of party. Now the parties face each other across a dividing aisle. And the member's offices, once scattered haphazardly through the legislative building across from the Capitol, are now on two different floors, one for the Democrat, one for the Republicans. About the only remaining link to an earlier era in the Minnesota House is the continued presence of Irv Anderson, the Democrat who engineered the Pavlak expulsion ploy in 1978 and served as speaker during the party's recent time of troubles in 1995 and 1996. Anderson missed most of the changes of the 1980s after losing his bid for reelection in 1982, but he returned to the chamber in 1990, and by 1993 he was the presiding officer. A gruff, acerbic and brilliant tactician from International Falls, the coldest city in America, Anderson acceded to the speakership in 1993 promising a kinder, gentler, "new Irv." But by last April the updated Anderson did not seem at all different from the vindictive and iron-fisted leader both parties remembered. He ran the institution with the same single-minded goal he had
emphasized in his earlier tour of duty: maintenance of partisan control at any cost. Republican parliamentary concerns were routinely ignored and dismissed. Their committee placement requests went unheeded. In the end, whatever Anderson's motives were, his campaign strategy worked--Democrats held the House. But he paid for it by losing the speakership. There is one difference between Tennessee and Minnesota that you won't pick up just by listening to the rhetoric or watching the proceedings on the floor. It is the composition of the membership. In Minnesota, NCSL classifies at least 30 members as "full-time legislators," and that is certainly fewer than the actual number, because many who do little else besides legislating still list some other occupation for the record. There is, in addition, a sizable contingent of government employees, teachers and labor officials. In Tennessee, only one legislator lists his occupation as full-time. The largest number are farmers or lawyers, or are drawn from the ranks of business. A 1993 NCSL study ranked Tennessee second in the nation (after Alaska) in the percentage of business owners serving as legislators. None of this is to say that any one profession is better suited to lawmaking than another. But it is hard to avoid noticing some degree of correspondence between professionalism and partisan acrimony. If professional legislatures attract more talented and better-informed members--and few dispute that they do--it is equally certain that these same members have difficulty avoiding partisan collisions with each other. Members who have devoted lives and careers to legislative service have a tendency to bristle at any perceived threats to it. In moments of conflict, they are all too aware that a reversal of fortune is only a controversial vote and one election cycle away. "There's more members who see their position as their full-time or primary occupation," says Minnesota's Robert Vanasek, who served as House speaker from 1987 to 1991, "and one of the consequences is that thinking about reelection is much more on their minds." Within the framework of the professional legislature, there is a certain inevitability to those partisan confrontations, because a body filled with capable legislators and skilled staff is unlikely to content itself with passing innocuous resolutions. Minnesota's 1995-96 regular session alone saw the introduction of 6,185 bills that touched nearly every industry, interest and enterprise in the state, ranging from wind-power energy to wine-tastings at
bed-and-breakfasts. Not only do interest groups grow more active and more sophisticated but some of the largest and most influential of these groups gradually evolve into appendages of the state parties--or perhaps vice versa. "It's not that we can't do things," says Senator John Marty, the 1994 Democratic gubernatorial nominee. "It's that there are pressures stopping them." In the Minnesota legislature, a liberal, labor-dominated Democratic conference collides with a Republican conference of anti-tax zealots, anchored in affluent suburbs and rural areas where anti-tax and low-spending pressures are the greatest. Between one caucus grounded in the notion of an activist government and another committed to de-funding and dismantling it, consensus has been almost impossible to find. The two parties are no longer merely at odds, they are now diametrically opposed to one another. "The worlds they are representing," observes University of Minnesota political scientist Frank Sorauf, "are increasingly divergent and homogeneous." Witness the wildly disparate assessments of the 1996 legislative session offered by each party's leaders. "We did what we promised to do last January," Speaker Anderson declared in April. "Pass legislation that makes streets safer, government more accountable, jobs more rewarding and education more effective." If that was indeed the outcome, then Republicans missed it altogether. "The people of Minnesota were the losers," concluded Steve Sviggum. "This was a frustrating session for those of us who expect accountability and responsibility in government." Tennessee passed a partisan milestone in 1995, but it did so in a remarkably civilized way. Late in the year, two party switches handed Republicans a tenuous one-vote Senate majority. The first thing the GOP did was to allow John Wilder, the Democratic Senate speaker to remain in the job he had held since 1971. Then, with control of the chamber up for grabs in the coming general election, they actively discouraged GOP opposition to Wilder in his home district. As implausible as those decisions might have seemed in most other states, in Tennessee they barely raised eyebrows. Wilder was simply reaping the returns on his own style of stewardship. It was he, after all, who had initiated the practice of naming Republicans as committee chairs while they remained in the minority in the mid-1980s. Even the most partisan senator would agree that Wilder harbors an abiding preoccupation with maintaining the chamber's civility and a collegial approach toward policy making. Last year, when the legislature passed a resolution naming a new state golf course after Wilder, the joke went around
that one of the rule...