|
Missouri's insane government bloat (Part 2)
Our legislature gets paid to do nothing. We can do better than what we've got.
|
| |||||||||||||||
Last month, I wrote about Missouri’s insanely bloated county governments—an irony, for a state that breathlessly claims to care about government inefficiency.¹
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.²
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, plus a small per diem.
For $41,000 per year, legislators have to maintain a second residence in Jefferson City, 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.³
“Roofying is rampant in Capitol events”
That’s a real quote reported in Missouri Scout a few weeks ago. 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 principals⁴ 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 and liars on a George Santosian scale⁵ 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, 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 for “Legislature”—is to make laws.
But Missouri’s legislature doesn’t really do that anymore.⁶
 |
I can say this objectively: Missouri’s legislators are bad at their job.⁷
The same thing is true of the federal government, by the way. Congress is slowly getting worse at its job.
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 during the Constitutional Convention, a body with equal representation by state to counterbalance a House of Representatives whose votes were allocated by population.⁸
Once upon a time, states were able to replicate the federal model more precisely.⁹ But after the Supreme Court ruling Reynolds v. Sims, 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.¹⁰
It’s a structure that only exists as a vestige of a totally different era, but other than Nebraska, 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.¹¹
But Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis described states as laboratories of democracy. 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 and then broke their promise¹²—we the people can do something about this.
Two things are true:
A majority of Americans do not think the government works efficiently and a vast majority do not trust the government to do the right thing.¹³
Seventeen states, including Missouri, allow citizens to initiate constitutional amendments.¹⁴
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.
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, 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 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.
Feel free to share this post with someone who will find this interesting. (If you’re reading this email because someone sent it to you, please consider subscribing.)
For press inquiries, please contact [email protected].
In a fun little twist: Ben Baker, until this past weekend the Chair of the Missouri House’s Government Efficiency Committee, isn’t even in the Missouri House anymore. He resigned to take on a role as State Director of Missouri Rural Development. Maybe four months of so-called government efficiency was enough to pad his résumé.
Missouri has 197 state legislators, seventh-most of any state in the country, on account of a relatively smaller Senate.
Missouri also has 115 counties and 954 municipalities, all of which carries overhead costs—in many cases needlessly—for the state. Of the municipalities, 13 have zero population, and dozens more have populations below 100.
Namely, an incentive to vote and act in a way that lines up legislators for better opportunities when they leave the House, rather than in a way that is best for their constituents.
“Principals” in this context refers to the elected officials themselves.
At some point, I’m imagining that there will be more reporting on certain members of the Missouri House who fit this description.
First of all, some sources for this: data from Mizzou, data from the Missouri House by year (going back to 2000), and data from the Missouri Senate by year (going back to 1996).
Second, some thoughts on how to interpret this data and its limitations:
The data from the ’90s only includes 1996-99, and the data from the ’20s only includes 2020-24. (I thought about excluding 2020, since the legislature adjourned early because of COVID, but somehow they were actually more productive that year.)
Earlier data exists but it’s not readily available on the internet and would force me to hunt down information in Mizzou libraries, a worthy project but one that would require me to commit time that I don’t have. I’d love to go back in time further, but the recent trendline is nonetheless quite clear.
In decades past, more laws were being signed by the Governor despite the fact that there were many years in this period with a Republican legislature and Democratic governor, which led to more vetoes. (In 2014, Democratic Governor Jay Nixon vetoed 24 bills.) Now, with total Republican control, they’re passing far fewer laws than ever before.
It is worth noting: this isn’t universally true across all state legislatures—although the data cited here only looks back five years, so it doesn’t tell us much. Other exogenous factors:
More states have one-party control, which generally leads to more output.
State legislatures are far more professionalized than they were 50 years ago.
But these are gains that are happening despite the structure of state governments, not because of it.
The U.S. Senate was also modeled after the House of Lords, both in its desired removal from the vicissitudes of day-to-day politics and also in its members set to be part of the American aristocracy.
First of all: since the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913, Senators have been elected by voters, not state legislators. (This happened during the Progressive Era that I mention above.) And in practice, it’s not like Senators before 1913 were really removed from vicissitudes of day-to-day politics anyway.
And second: the House of Lords was entirely comprised of hereditary legislators in the 18th century. (Somewhat shockingly, the House of Lords still has hereditary seats. At least for now; there are plans to get rid of the final hereditary seats in the Lords. Until 1999, every hereditary peer—think Dukes, Earls, Barons, etc.—had a right to sit in the House of Lords. But the House of Lords has very little power today.)
If you’re interested in early U.S. political history, this whole paragraph from a 2004 Harper’s Magazine article is quite fascinating:
Alexander Hamilton proclaimed, on the floor of the convention, that “the British Government was the best in the world; and that he doubted whether anything short of it would do in America.” John Dickinson argued for “the Senate to consist of the most distinguished characters, distinguished for their rank in life and their weight of property, and bearing as strong a likeness to the British House of Lords as possible.” James Madison declared that “the Senate ought to come from, and represent, the Wealth of the nation.” Edmund Randolph wanted the “number of Members for the Senate… to be less than the House of Commons… to restrain, if possible, the fury of democracy.”
Check out this 1964 data from Mo Udall. (Source)
In the Connecticut General Assembly, one House district had 191 people.
In the New Hampshire General Court, the Town of Ellsworth with a population of three people had a Representative in the lower house; this was the same representation given to Bedford, with a population of 3,636.
In the Utah State Legislature, the smallest district had 165 people, the largest 32,380.
In the Vermont General Assembly, the smallest district had 36 people, the largest 35,000.
In the Idaho Senate, the smallest district had 969 people; the largest, 93,400.
In the Nevada Senate, seventeen members represented as many as 127,000 or as few as 568 people.
Since we’re deep in the weeds of British political history in these footnotes, all of this has shades of the UK’s Reform Act 1832 and the so-called rotten boroughs.
And not for nothing: the goals they were serving were usually pretty bad. To quote the majority opinion in Reynolds v. Sims: “Legislators represent people, not trees or acres. Legislators are elected by voters, not farms or cities or economic interests.”
Article V of the U.S. Constitution says, “no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.”
This is one of the few parts of the Constitution protected from the ordinary process for amendments. Another protected part set the rules for the importation of slaves, though that sunset in 1808.
By the way: I can say with total confidence that, despite my query for ChatGPT, this list isn’t exhaustive. I bet there are many, many dozens of others. (Also, I haven’t fact-checked this ChatGPT search. It sometimes gets this stuff wrong, but it’s at least directionally accurate.)
At the same time, good reforms—ranked-choice voting, for instance—are proving unpopular with voters. I do think ranked-choice voting would help address a lot of issues, but voters right now don’t agree with me.
Alaska is a proof point that ranked-choice voting helps bring people together and helps elect people who are closer to the median voter—exactly what it should be doing.
Mississippi technically does, but in a quirk of their state constitution, they require collecting signatures in five of the state’s Congressional districts despite the fact that the state only has four Congressional districts. The legislature is very unlikely to give up its power, so unless Mississippi’s population grows and they gain a district, in practice Mississippians don’t have this right.
| ||||||||||
