Aye, aye, oh God aye!

I'm currently reading what may be the most erotic depiction of legislative procedure ever committed to ink:

I'll have what they're having.

Bigger or smaller chambers?

Dan Smith points me to this recent item in Stateline:

Nebraska is the only state with a unicameral Legislature, and lawmakers there are debating what size it should be. Competing bills call for increasing or decreasing the number of seats. Senator Bob Krist would like to decrease the number from 49 to 45 in order to save money. But Kate Sullivan would like to see Western Nebraska acquire an additional seat, making the Legislature an even 50. Minnesota, too, is debating its size. Bills in both chambers would eliminate 11 Senate and 22 House seats; currently the House has 134 seats and the Senate 67.

As it happens, I was recently speaking with someone in Nebraska who used to be very involved in the state government and is highly critical of the small size of the legislature there. He argued that having only 49 legislators makes it very easy for lobbyists to control the place. It's easy for them to know every legislator quite well and to build majority coalitions.

Personally, I would have thought the opposite would be true. A small legislature means that reporters and voters can relatively easily follow events in the chamber, which makes things somewhat harder for lobbyists, who thrive on voter ignorance.* A very large legislature, spread across multiple chambers, however, provides lots of different players with different preferences and lots of barely visible veto points.

It may be that a small legislature is good for lobbyists who are trying to push legislation through, while a largely legislature is good for lobbyists who are trying to stop legislation.

At any rate, it sounds like the proposals currently under consideration in Nebraska wouldn't affect legislative performance all that much, although one could certainly see how they matter for representation of groups and areas that currently feel marginalized.


*I can see how this phrase might sound pejorative toward lobbyists. I certainly don't mean it that way. Nonetheless, there's a good deal of evidence suggesting that lobbyists are more powerful when voters have a harder time paying attention to politics. Legislators are understandably less likely to vote the way a powerful lobby wants them to if they believe there will be electoral consequences for it, and that can only happen when voters have information about their roll call records.

10,000 doors

Most of the Nebraska senators to whom I spoke during my recent trip expressed the value of door-to-door campaigning. Money and endorsements are nice, they said, but door-knocking is essential, allowing an underfinanced candidate to win. Conversely, a well endowed candidate who doesn't bother to meet constituents will lose.

Just how many doors are we talking about? There are approximately 35,000 Nebraskans per state legislative district. If you omit the children and account for the folks that live together, that comes to roughly 10,000 doors to knock on. Indeed, several senators cited the 10,000 figure to me.

Is it really possible for a politician to knock on 10,000 doors?

I've done some campaign door-knocking, and it's exhausting. But let's say it takes only about 30 seconds to check a door where no one's home, maybe leaving behind some campaign literature. It takes about a minute to briefly greet a person who really doesn't want to talk to a politician -- that's a lot of them. There are probably a relatively few folks who actually want to talk to or yell at a politician that comes to their door -- that could take five or ten minutes.  So let's suppose that the average door-knocking taking about a minute, probably more in sparsely populated rural districts.

10,000 minutes equals 167 hours of campaign time. If you do this 6 hours per day (grueling, but possible) you could reach 10,000 doors in under a month.

So yes, it's possible. It's a month when you're really doing nothing else, including whatever your day job is (Nebraska senators only make about $12,000 a year as legislators and thus need a regular job or personal wealth). On the other hand, actually meeting with constituents might be a good thing for the democratic system.

Second dispatch from Nebraska

The weather has improved considerably -- it's now sunny and over 20ºF! And I kid you not: this place is fascinating from a parties perspective. Here are some things I've learned so far:

• The Speaker of the Unicam has very few formal powers. Both he and the committee chairs are elected by secret ballot (!), so he can't reward loyal members with sweet committee chairmanships. Nor can he reward or punish people using office funding or staff allocations, as those are required to be equal across offices. Nor can he directly assign bills to friendly or unfriendly committees. A particularly partisan and creative Speaker could, I suppose, come up with ways of controlling the agenda, but it would be real work.
• Legislators love the Unicam. Legislators I've spoken to in other states often speak with reverence about their own state and some of their colleagues, but usually reference a "system" or "partisanship" or something else that prevents good ideas from becoming law. Nebraska, conversely, seems like a really great place to be a state legislator. The pay is terrible, but with only 49 members, no (official) parties, and no other chamber to whine about/mess things up, they all seem to know each other pretty well and don't see the value in demonizing one another.
• What is good for legislators is not necessarily good for the folks outside. The parties, at various times in the past, have called for the legislature to become a partisan institution. Apparently, the calls for that were a bit louder a few years ago when there were more Democrats in the chamber and Republican activists thought they could more reliably prevail on legislation in a partisan system. But now with fewer than 15 registered Democrats in the chamber, Republicans figure they will win no matter what, and Dems agree.
• There's broad agreement that the Unicam is becoming more polarized, and a variety of explanations as to why, including term limits, the influence of a very partisan Governor Heineman, and ramped up recruiting efforts by the Democratic Party. I witnessed a contentious debate about lawsuit immunity on the chamber floor yesterday that broke somewhat along party lines. I'm told this is unusual.
• There's a secretive society of business leaders in Omaha called the Knights of Ak-Sar-Ben (Nebraska spelled backwards). They're mostly focused on business development and philanthropy and host a bizarre annual ball that sounds like something out of Mardi Gras, but apparently they sometimes get involved in politics. I'm trying to learn more about them.
• Lazlo's in Lincoln's Haymarket neighborhood brews some pretty decent beer.

First dispatch from Nebraska

I am in Lincoln, Nebraska right now conducting interviews about the nonpartisan state legislature here. It is currently 8 degrees Fahrenheit with blowing snow, and the conditions are considerably better than those I left behind in Denver. The legislators have all shown up for work, although several are surprised I made it out of Colorado.

One curious thing to report so far: Despite lacking parties since the 1930s, the legislative chamber does, in fact, have an aisle (see photo at left). I'm not sure yet who sits on which side, or whether the aisle itself migrates between roll call votes.

Due to weather conditions, I'm trying to spend as much time as possible inside the capitol building. I hope that doesn't end up skewing my results. So far, I can report that the officials I've met with have been very pleasant and accommodating, and they are extremely enamored of the chamber's nonpartisan tradition. I'm also pleased to note that the building has free public wi-fi, ample heat, and no security screening, making it one of the most welcoming capitols I've had the pleasure to visit.

I'm being told I need to try a runza, which is Lincoln's culinary claim to fame. I'm looking.