Elections 2006
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Reform in the state legislature: two years ago it was the
issue at the tip of everyone’s tongue. The BrennanCenter’s report was freshly out,
chronicling the legislature’s dysfunction in excruciating detail. Making the
changes the BrennanCenter
recommended became a major issue leading up to the elections.
But that was then. This year, well, there are just more
distractions. For one thing, there are the far sexier US
Congressional races and the suspense of control over of the national agenda.
And while the presumed election of Eliot Spitzer could have
boosted discussion of reform, that hasn’t happened for the most part. Spitzer
has said repeatedly that he plans to bring his talent for fixing up Wall Street
to the problem of Albany’s culture.
But he’s been coy about offering specific positions on issues, including
reform.
Laboring in the shadows of larger races, and often with
miniscule campaign funds, challengers in state legislature races struggle to be
heard. Many won’t be able to pay for radio or television ads. And few, if any,
will get elected.
That, according to the authors of the Brennan report, is
exactly what’s so problematic about the existing system. The report’s authors
scrutinized both the State Senate and Assembly and found that practices you
might expect in a democracy were either stunted or completely lacking. Bills
that made it to the floor of either house always passed, while others
disappeared into a mordant committee system.
Legislators in the majority in each house — Republicans in
the Senate and Democrats in the Assembly — followed the agenda of their
leaders, Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver.
There was little incentive for rank-and-file legislators to be independent and
plenty to keep in line, the report found. The result was that very little
policy debate took place before the public on the floor of the legislature.
More than two years later, the BrennanCenter released a follow-up report.
Little has changed, it said.
And legislative procedure is only part of the problem.
Good-government groups have long called for reforming the way districts are
drawn and campaigns are paid for. Right now, both houses redraw district
boundaries after each census. That means seats tend to be non-competitive for
members of each majority party.
And incumbents’ enrollment advantage is extended by their
access to more money than most of their challengers can hope to raise. The
result is an entrenched establishment of legislators who have little fear of
being ousted by unhappy voters.
There are plenty of important issues facing the state —
but they’ll get little debate by the people’s representatives. True policy
compromises are still hammered out in party caucuses, in backroom deals, or
between the governor, Assembly speaker, and Senate majority leader — the
“three men in a room.”
Considering all that, in interviews with
state-legislature candidates this fall City Newspaper focused almost
exclusively on reform.
Not surprisingly, every single candidate interviewed said
they supported the four reforms we asked about: redistricting, campaign
finance, greater independence for committees and committee chairs, and greater
control by rank-and-file legislators over what comes to the floor. (A few
embraced reform with some hesitation, however.)
In our interviews, some candidates had thoughtful or
creative ideas about how to fix redistricting or how campaigns are financed.
Also not surprisingly, challengers uniformly condemned the system and insisted
that their opponents are part of the problem.
More interesting were the responses of the incumbents. Some
defended the status quo or argued that things appear more dysfunctional than
they are. Almost all of them said the problems were worse in the other house.
Democratic Assembly member Joe Morelle defended the current
system of drawing district lines, for example. First, he argued, gerrymandering
isn’t as easy as the public seems to think.
“At the state legislative level,” he said, “there are three
primary considerations on redistricting. The first is there’s a stipulation in
the state constitution that towns cannot be split into pieces. The second issue
that we have to be mindful of is the Voting Rights Act, to make sure that we
don’t disenfranchise, in particular, people of color. And the third is that the
districts have to be all very close to each other in size because of the
one-person, one-vote mandate from the Supreme Court.”
“So what you have,” said Morelle, “is less latitude than
people think we have.”
Morelle also rejects the idea that removing legislators from
the process would result in better districts. A legislator’s job is to
represent the people, including in the redistricting process, he said.
“Part of the value of having a political discussion about
redistricting relates to how a community is represented,” he said. “For
instance, in this past redistricting process, MonroeCounty effectively lost its power
in the House of Representatives. We have not a single member of Congress who
has a singular focus on MonroeCounty.
That’s just an example where a political decision was made, but it could easily
have been made by a panel of non-partisan individuals, and the question of
whether the political community as representatives of the public ought to have
some say in it is still important.”
The gist of what Morelle is saying is true: a non-political
redistricting panel would still have to choose some priorities over others, and
centering a district in this county might not be one of them. But such a
process almost certainly wouldn’t result in a district as tortured as Louise
Slaughter’s: a barbell-shaped area 70 or 80 miles long and one town wide for
much of its length.
And if Morelle is so enamored of the politicians’ role in
representing their constituents in all things, including redistricting, is he
willing to accept — along with his GOP Senate colleagues — some of the
blame for divvying up Monroe County
into four congressional districts?
Morelle also opposes giving more power to committee chairs
— a key BrennanCenter
recommendation. In an interview with City Newspaper this summer (Click here for interview),
Jeremy Creelan, one of the report’s authors, called committees the laboratories
of democracy. Independence for
committee leaders would eventually produce better policy, he argued. But
Morelle appears to view committees more as a mechanism for maverick legislators
to hold the system hostage. Under the Assembly Speaker’s control, committee
chairs are more likely to cooperate with colleagues, he said.
“With a speaker that’s elected by the broad membership of
the house, you have someone who has constituents all over the state and has to
be interested in those constituencies all over the state, whereas the committee
chair doesn’t necessarily,” said Morelle. “They’re not elected by the broad
rank-and-file members, and so they could be more autocratic.”
For example: “Let’s say there’s a guy from the Bronx
that has a certain philosophy, and all the bills that go through his committee
have to share that philosophy,” said Morelle. “If you turn control of all the
bills that go through that committee over to that individual, you might not end
up with better outcomes than you have now.”
What he neglects to say is how the speaker comes by his
“statewide constituencies”: through members like Morelle, who sacrifice some of
their own power and therefore their ability to be accountable to their own
constituents.
It’s an elaborate two-step that keeps the legislators at a
safe distance from consequences either at the hands of party leaders or their
district’s voters.
This article appears in Oct 25-31, 2006.
