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Last month, I wrote about Missouri’s insanely bloated county governments [ [link removed] ]—an irony, for a state that breathlessly [ [link removed] ] claims [ [link removed] ] to [ [link removed] ] care [ [link removed] ] about [ [link removed] ] government [ [link removed] ] inefficiency [ [link removed] ].
But that isn’t the end of Missouri’s government bloat. Just look at Jefferson City:
Missouri’s House of Representatives has way more members than most states—but not many of the state’s best people.
Missouri’s legislature is objectively bad at its job.
State legislatures everywhere desperately need reform and innovation.
This is a story about Missouri specifically. But it’s also a story about a profound lack of imagination in government everywhere in the U.S.
Article summary:
Missouri’s legislature doesn’t pass laws, isn’t doing its job, and isn’t attracting the best people. That’s true in state legislatures across the country.
As with our arcane county structure, no one has bothered to reform the setup of state legislatures in centuries. Ambitious reforms are overdue—and are possible, thanks to citizen-led ballot measures.
Our legislature is not attracting enough good people
Missouri’s House of Representatives has 163 members, the fourth-most of any state legislative chamber in the country [ [link removed] ].
That’s probably an indication that we have too many legislators, but the issue isn’t the number of legislators, per se:
Missouri pays its legislators about $41,000 per year [ [link removed] ], plus a small per diem.
For $41,000 per year, legislators have to maintain a second residence in Jefferson City [ [link removed] ], so their effective income is in fact even lower.
Also, and this is important: they have to spend half of their year in Jefferson City. And who would want to do that? (To say nothing of the long back-and-forth commute.)
A very simple reform: if we cut the number of legislators in half, we could pay each of them double and it’d have literally zero impact on the budget.
And by paying them double, I think we’d attract much better people. Right now, most state legislators have higher-paying opportunities when they leave than when they serve, and that sets up bad incentives.
“Roofying is rampant in Capitol events”
That’s a real quote reported in [ [link removed] ]Missouri Scout [ [link removed] ] a few weeks ago [ [link removed] ]. I don’t know how this isn’t a total scandal. The source had a longer quote; here’s some additional context:
The culture of abuse crosses roles and party lines. Predators are not limited to one chamber, one gender, or one job title. There are legislators, staff, journalists, lobbyists, and principals who use their power and access to harass, coerce, or assault others. This affects both women and men.
Drugging is real, and it’s rampant in Capitol spaces. Roofying is rampant at Capitol events and spaces. I personally know of nearly a dozen instances, involving both men and women, in bars, caucus events, private parties, and even official offices.
To state the obvious, this is horrifying.
Missouri has some terrific legislators, but even beyond the roofying, there are some terrible ones too: defenders of child marriage [ [link removed] ] and liars on a George Santosian scale and nutjobs of all stripes.
Does decreasing the number of legislators end this problem? No, not on its own. But running for office is hard [ [link removed] ], and we have to make it more appealing for good people to run for office. Better pay is a good place to start.
They’re objectively getting worse at their jobs
The job of a legislature—literally, the first sentence on the Wikipedia page [ [link removed] ] for “Legislature”—is to make laws.
But Missouri’s legislature doesn’t really do that anymore.
I can say this objectively: Missouri’s legislators are bad at their job.
The same thing is true of the federal government [ [link removed] ], by the way. Congress is slowly getting worse at its job [ [link removed] ].
Serious about government efficiency? Start with our legislators, who we’re paying to do basically nothing. We’ve got to come up with better structure than what we have.
Why do states even have two legislative chambers?
The simple answer: states modeled their governments and constitutions after the federal government.
The problem is that none of this makes any sense anymore.
The U.S. Senate was designed as a compromise [ [link removed] ] during the Constitutional Convention [ [link removed] ], a body with equal representation by state to counterbalance a House of Representatives whose votes were allocated by population.
Once upon a time, states were able to replicate the federal model more precisely. But after the Supreme Court ruling Reynolds v. Sims [ [link removed] ], state legislative districts have been mandated to be equal in population.
What that means: states have senates that exist only because they’ve historically existed, even though they serve none of the goals they were originally designed to serve.
It’s a structure that only exists as a vestige of a totally different era, but other than Nebraska [ [link removed] ], no other state has bothered to change the makeup of its legislature in centuries. It’s just like the country’s county infrastructure that I wrote about a few weeks ago:
States can work better
Because of constraints in the Constitution, it’s functionally impossible to change the composition of the U.S. Senate.
But Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis described states as laboratories of democracy [ [link removed] ]. And although we’ve seen that legislators are very unlikely to vote themselves out of a job—just look at the hilariously long list of politicians who committed to self-imposed term limits [ [link removed] ] and then broke their promise—we the people can do something about this.
Two things are true:
A majority of Americans do not think the government works efficiently [ [link removed] ] and a vast majority do not trust the government to do the right thing [ [link removed] ].
Seventeen states, including Missouri, allow citizens to initiate constitutional amendments [ [link removed] ].
What this means: we are ripe for ambitious reforms to make government work better and restore people’s faith in our institutions.
We are not constrained by government structures just because we’ve used them for a while.
For most states, including Missouri, having two legislative chambers is wasteful, generates unnecessary process, and is a vestige of a different era. More states should move to a unicameral legislature [ [link removed] ].
But I’d take this even further. There are lots of other systems of government that, with the right rules, constitutional guidelines, and guardrails in place, would work well.
There’s no reason more states shouldn’t be ambitious in their reforms: parliamentary systems, citizens’ assemblies [ [link removed] ], and more. Even with a legislature that doesn’t do much, ballot measures give us a path to more innovative and ambitious reform.
That was something Americans once did. But that largely ended after the Progressive Era [ [link removed] ] a century ago. Since then, there’s been remarkably little reform.
It’s time to do more. And since Missouri’s do-nothing legislature isn’t up to the task, it’ll be citizen-led initiatives that get us there.
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