 The House of Representatives chamber in the Massachusetts State House. |
I WOULD like someday to live in a state where legislators don't regard their constituents with barely disguised contempt. But for decades I have lived in Massachusetts, where such contempt is part of the natural order.
Six weeks ago, Massachusetts voters overwhelmingly approved Question 1, a ballot initiative empowering the state auditor to audit the Legislature. Though House and Senate leaders opposed Question 1, one might have expected them to accept the people's decisive mandate and cooperate in implementing the new measure. Not a chance. The House speaker and Senate president said only that they would "consider" how to proceed. Meanwhile, they refuse even to concede that Question 1 took effect 30 days after the election, the standard rule for ballot initiatives. They insist the new law won't become operative until a second month has elapsed. At that point, it is safe to assume, they will find another pretext to disrespect the voters.
The Legislature never seems to lack for ways to signal disdain for public opinion — from abrogating leadership term limits to giving itself three simultaneous pay raises to conducting virtually all its business in secret to never meeting its deadline for passing a state budget. It excels at circumventing ethical rules. Last month the Globe reported that the Legislature has created a "gaping" loophole in the law limiting the amount of money lobbyists may donate to legislative candidates: It permits lobbyists' spouses to donate five times as much.
I remember a conversation about 25 years ago with the late David Broder, a highly esteemed Washington Post correspondent who was long known as the dean of the Washington press corps. He was struck, he said, by how often voters he met during his travels around the country expressed the view that their state legislators were the worst in America. I assured him that people elsewhere said that only because they didn't live in Massachusetts.
It is a truism that Bay State voters have the Legislature they elected. If we sent better men and women to Beacon Hill, we would presumably have a better government. But that is much easier said than done in a state where the Legislature is effectively in session year-round and where the political culture is in thrall to the fallacy that legislating is a full-time activity, to be entrusted to well-paid "professional" lawmakers separate from the citizens they govern.
Massachusetts is not like most states, where legislatures convene each January for a strictly limited period — three to four months is typical — and go home after crafting a budget and dealing with whatever legislative priorities need attention. In a few states, including booming Texas, legislative sessions are biennial; a few months every other year is all lawmakers require to get their jobs done.
Most state legislatures, in other words, are normally not in session. During a visit in September to South Dakota, my wife and I visited the state capital, Pierre, and wandered amid a serene silence through the handsome Greek Revival statehouse. The state Senate and House of Representatives had adjourned on March 25, their work for the year having been completed in just over two months. That work included passing a budget for the coming fiscal year; approving pay increases for health care providers and state employees; creating a state office for indigent legal services; adopting a bill to fund prison construction; designating the dangerous sedative xylazine a controlled substance; defining antisemitism for purposes of state law; and banning foreign entities such as China from owning farmland.
South Dakota lawmakers work efficiently because they know they have only 10 weeks in which to get everything accomplished — and because most of them have occupations to get back to. In South Dakota, unlike in Massachusetts, legislating is not a career but a part-time public service undertaken by citizens who have full-time occupations.
"We just had an election in which the American public revolted against rule by elites," Drew Cline, who heads the Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy in Concord, N.H., told me in an email. "Yet professionalized legislatures are exactly that. They turn the Legislature itself into a separate class distinguished from regular citizens." New Hampshire's Legislature is the quintessence of citizen lawmaking: Its House of Representatives comprises 400 members drawn from all walks of life, who are paid just $100 per year for their service. The contrast with Massachusetts — where each legislator is paid at least $90,000, including expense accounts and "leadership" stipends — could hardly be more dramatic.
"A core tenet of self-government should be that people volunteer for service for a short time, then return to their plows," Cline argues. But in "professional" legislatures like the one in Massachusetts, "legislators no longer have plows to return to."
There are only 10 states with full-time legislatures. Most of them are like California, Illinois, and New York — high-spending, big-government liberal strongholds, more likely than other states to see residents leave and apt to rank low in tabulations of economic freedom. Correlation doesn't prove causation, but it certainly provides food for thought. Scholarly research shows that in states with part-time, nonprofessional legislatures, government expenditure per capita is significantly lower. Other research has shown that longer legislative sessions and higher salaries for lawmakers lead to less competitive elections and more entrenched incumbents.
Voters in Massachusetts gain nothing from having a Legislature that is in session year-round, nor from paying senators and representatives exceptionally generous salaries. Far from improving the quality of the legislative branch, professionalizing it has made legislators arrogant, remote, and perpetually incapable of doing their job.
Massachusetts needs a Legislature less like California's and Illinois's and more like the ones in South Dakota and New Hampshire. The way to bring about such a transformation is with a constitutional amendment strictly limiting legislative sessions to no more than a few months per year. Judging from the lopsided bipartisan vote in favor of Question 1 last month, Massachusetts voters recognize how dysfunctional Beacon Hill is and are eager for reform. It will be good to have a Legislature that is regularly audited, but more important by far is to have a Legislature that regularly adjourns.
Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.
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