Two
years out, it’s clear that Jeremy Creelan hasn’t lost his passion for this
stuff.
From
the wonkiest of details to the philosophy underlying it all, the attorney
speaks with the urgency of someone immersed in a cause in which he believes
deeply. In this case, that passion is directed toward an unlikely concern:
legislative procedure.
Creelan
made something of a name for himself as the co-author of a 2004 report on the
New York State Legislature and its dysfunctionality, published by the Brennan
Center at NYU.
But
Creelan’s interest in the issue of good government began earlier. He first
became aware of New York State’s unique, sometimes archaic, legislative
practices as chair of the Committee on State Affairs for the Association of the
Bar of New York. That eventually led him to work on
the report that called New York’s legislature the nation’s most dysfunctional.
It cited problematic trappings of each body like the overwhelming control that
the Senate and Assembly leaders exert, the moribund committee system, and
empty-seat voting. The report earned plenty of media attention and led to some
changes, though not as many as it called for.
Since
then, Creelan has left the Brennan Center to return to private practice. (Even
there, he’s partially following his passion: the firm he now works for, Jenner & Block, specializes in government and election
law, recently representing the Democratic Party before the US Supreme Court in
the controversial Texas redistricting case.) He hasn’t left his enthusiasm for
state legislature reform behind. He’s still speaking out for the changes he
originally backed in the report.
“I
would just say that the fight is not over,” he says. “The public still needs to
hold their legislators accountable for not only specific legislation but also
for how the government works, how the legislature functions.”
What
follows is an edited transcript of a recent conversation with Creelan.
City
Newspaper: You made specific recommendations about rules changes. How many of
them have been adopted?
Jeremy
Creelan: Probably the first clear success was eliminating empty-seat voting,
requiring legislators to sit in their seats. And that change has, I think,
improved the quality of deliberations. In the few instances where it really
matters whether people actually debate something on the floor, there’s now the
expectation that if a bill comes up and there’s a controversy about it, people
will actually debate it and others will be there to listen to it.
Are there
others?
There
are two things I’d point to. One was the use of conference committees.
Particularly in the budget process, the expectation that there will be a
conference committee to reconcile the Senate bill with the Assembly bill to try
and come up with a compromise version: that changed. That was something they
did in the budget process in 2005 that was a dramatic change, and it was in
part a result of our pushing for conference committees to be used more
regularly.
Sometimes
the changes are just for show in Albany, and other times they’re meaningful.
But the hope is that if they’re used repeatedly over a longer period, they will
become part of the expectation of the legislators themselves, and then they
will become more meaningful. It’s kind of like a muscle that hasn’t been used,
and as it gets used more it will become stronger and better.
The
second thing is committee hearings. I think it’s fair to say that the importance
of committee hearings was impressed upon the legislature, and both the number
and the extent of issues that were addressed by them increased. I don’t know if
that’s temporary or not. Certainly they increased in 2005, and my understanding
from talking to legislators is that has produced a better, more deliberative
process. So those are the main ones I would point to.
There
were a whole bunch of other changes, but the other ones I’m not convinced were that
meaningful. In the Assembly, for example, they implemented all these
subcommittees to try to give junior members more of a role, more independence
in the process, to allow them to pursue their policy goals and interests
through subcommittees. I don’t see any evidence that that really has made a big
difference in the independence of the committees.
What
percentage of your recommendations was adopted?
I
think it’s probably less than 20 percent. Percentage-wise it’s a small number;
we made 19 or 20 recommendations or something like that.
But
I would say the biggest change was just a much greater awareness among the
legislators themselves of the public’s concern over the legislative process.
Before then — as was evidenced by the leadership’s response to the report
when it first came out, which I think could be characterized as dismissive —
they did not believe that the public cared at all about how the government
worked. They thought the public only cared about specific issues —
bread-and-butter issues like schools, the economy, whatever it may be —
rather than how the government worked.
And
they realized that actually voters do care about that. They not only care about
it but they know something about it.
That
awareness produced a whole set of different outcomes, including the on-time
budget.
Why do you
think your report resonated with voters, when other reports in the past hadn’t?
I
think part of it is that it resonated with an existing perception. The public
already had an inkling that the government was dysfunctional. This report sort
of amplified and gave content to that feeling. If there hadn’t been that
existing perception out there, I don’t think it would’ve had legs.
And
you have to remember: there was sort of a perfect storm. At the time we released
it, the legislature had just failed once again to deal with the educational
funding issue. This was in July. They did not have a budget. It was just one of
the worst summers in recent history for public perception of legislative
competence. And so I think it came at the right time.
Of the
recommendations that remain to be adopted, which do you think are the most
important?
Well,
there are a whole bunch and we always view them holistically and say that they
need to be viewed that way, because any one particular change would not rock
the world. They all really need to be done together in order to make a sea
change.
But
there are three areas that I would point to that still need a lot of reform.
One is the control over the legislative calendar — basically what gets to the
floor for a vote by the full chamber. Other legislatures, both at the state
level and in congress, provide the members with a mechanism to overturn the
leadership’s decisions about whether to bring a bill to the floor or not. The threat
of that encourages negotiation to get bills done.
Currently,
the speaker and the majority leader exclusively control what gets to the floor,
and so you have these decisions about voting that are completely opaque. No one
knows why a bill didn’t get to the floor, and it’s just a brick wall that
people face when they try to get legislation through. It shouldn’t be that way.
The
second area is committees. There still needs to be a lot of emphasis on making
the committees independent from the leadership and allowing them to pursue
their own path and allowing the chairpersons to pursue their own path. From a
policy perspective, it allows each committee to become its own laboratory for
policy development.
Part
of the outcome you hope for is that if that kind of independence is nurtured,
then over time you get better policy. You get more input, you get more
initiative, you get more entrepreneurship in the committee chairs and in the
committees, and that ultimately produces a better policy outcome.
The
other thing is you get more people reading bills. If the committees have more
independence, you have more of the sense that it’s worth reading a bill,
because you know that there’s a chance in hell that your bill could actually
get to the floor and be considered.
Do we still
have the most dysfunctional state legislature in the nation?
Well,
our original report did not rank the states. It looked at a number of different
indicia to see how New York stacked up. And I think on most of those — we’d
have to update the analysis fully to give you an answer — but in most of
those categories, my sense is that New York has not changed that much. There’s
definitely been improvement, but I don’t think it’s that significant.
In his
Democratic Party acceptance speech, Eliot Spitzer mentioned redistricting. He
said there will be no more lifelong incumbency. What authority does a governor
have over legislative redistricting and preventing gerrymandering?
Well,
the governor has to sign the bill that determines the districts.
But wouldn’t
they just override a veto? If Senate Republicans and Assembly Democrats already
had their own mutually-beneficial agreement, mustering two-thirds at that point
seems like a gimme.
Right.
Certainly that’s an open question. I think the question is really whether the
legislature would override it — whether the public would tolerate that or
not.
So it’d be as
much a matter of wielding political capital as the veto?
Right.
My own sense is that it’d be hard for the legislature to override a veto on that
issue, because it’s so self-serving. Then again, nothing really surprises me in
Albany, so it’s a possibility.
Is there
something in the political atmosphere in New York State that is more resistant
to change than in other states?
I
don’t know one way. What I do know is that these problems are longstanding and
are very much entrenched. There are many reasons why things stay the same in
terms of the legislative process. The leadership control is supported by the
redistricting process. It’s supported by the campaign-finance laws, because
[the leaders] control the housekeeping accounts on a lot of the
campaign-finance resources. It’s supported by member items, which they use to
reward loyal members and punish disloyal members, which makes it hard to change
the rules.
And
ultimately it is something that it’s hard to get the public mobilized about. So
there are lots of reasons why things stay the same. That’s what was so special
about 2004 and 2005 — that the public really overcame that, to some degree.
Rochester reformers
Bob
Volpe still remembers the moment it happened.
The
Kodak retiree says he’d always paid attention to New YorkState’s government,
but he didn’t see himself as a reform activist. That changed a few years ago
after the state’s highest court ruled on a school-aid lawsuit and ordered the
legislature to enact a funding formula. But the legislative session came and
went with no formula in sight.
“They
decided not to decide. And that pressed my button,” recalls Volpe.
“Coincidentally, that was about the same time the Brennan Center Report came
out.”
Now,
two years later, every seat in the state Senate and Assembly is up for election
again, and some of the same people who championed reform in 2004 are trying to
put the issue back on the public’s radar again.
Volpe,
the communications chair for Citizens for Better Government in New York, is among
them. His group, which consists of volunteers based in the Rochester area, has
teamed up with a coalition that includes similar groups elsewhere in the state,
good-government groups like Common Cause and the League of Women Voters, and
advocacy groups.
Their
task won’t be as easy as it was two years ago. This year there are a handful of
statewide races, including the one for governor and a Senate race that’s
getting national scrutiny. Still, Volpe is undeterred. Asked if those
higher-profile races would distract voters from local legislative contests and
the issues of legislative reform, he responds: “Frankly, we haven’t thought
about it, but we figure there’s some synergism,” especially with the
gubernatorial race.”
Perhaps
he’s right. Everyone in that race has cast themselves as the best reformer.
Right
now, the Democrats control the Assembly and Republicans the Senate. Both
parties redraw the district maps to ensure it stays that way. Changing that
redistricting process is one of CBGNY’s top goals.
“There’s
an unholy alliance between the Republicans in the Senate and the Democrats in
the Assembly,” says Volpe. “The legislators pick their voters, not the other
way around.”
The
second major goal for CBGNY is to get each house of the legislature to pass
rules changes. This comes straight out of the BrennanCenter’s playbook.
That report listed 20 or so changes to the rules each body operates under. The
changes are designed to make leadership more accountable for what legislation
passes and what doesn’t and to give rank-and-file legislators more say in the
day-to-day business of legislating.
A
handful of these changes — like requiring legislators to be present to vote
— were enacted in 2004 or 2005, when reform was still in vogue in Albany. But a
substantial majority were not.
On top of the
other obstacles, reform advocates face the problem of energizing an
apathetic public around a less-than-exciting issue. Volpe acknowledges that can
be difficult. This “convoluted system,” as he calls it, helps stymie
substantive policy debate and change in state government. Witnessing that
stagnation, voters see less incentive to participate, and grow apathetic.
“They
don’t feel their vote can make any change,” says Volpe, so they don’t vote,
which further entrenches the system. “There’s a vicious circle.”
This
means that connecting the tedious business of legislative procedure to the
larger issues facing the state is the task undertaken by groups like CBGNY.
For
Volpe and the rest of his group, there are tangible reminders of how the
unattended procedural problems have led to stagnation in the state.
“One
of our common characteristics in our group is that our kids have left,” he
says. “We have to get on a plane to see our grandkids.”
For
more information, check out these sites:
Citizens for Better Government in New York
This article appears in Aug 16-22, 2006.
