I was talking about the American colonies pre-independence.
Forgive me, I thought we were talking about something that might help folks in the present.
I was talking about why we now have two-house legislatures everywhere, which is relevant.
A bicameral Legislature makes it harder to get legislation passed? That’s a feature, not a bug.
I am arguing for the reverse – see the OP. A separation-of-powers system involves power-tension between the executive and legislative branches; I say we’ve gone way too far to the executive side.
Also, whatever makes legislation easier/harder to pass, makes legislation easier/harder to repeal or amend. A one-house legislature can more readily fix its mistakes.
Bicameralism has a purpose when there’s some difference in what the chambers represent. Maybe it’s still not a good thing, but at least you can point to a division in what the two houses are meant to do. When they’re two flavors of the same thing as they are in most states now, they really just duplicate effort. The US Senate, for all its faults, is not the US House, and it has a distinctly different purpose. The Ohio Senate, on the other hand, is pretty much the Ohio House with fewer members. The terms are longer, but 4 years vs 2 years isn’t really much of a difference. Their members are elected in single-member districts, and a lot of the members just flip back and forth between chambers in order to circumvent the term limits enacted in the 90s. (My current state representative has switched houses twice because he was term limited. He really had the same role and responsibilities in both chambers, except he represented three times as many people in the Senate.)
Bicameralism is less responsive and less responsible to the public. That’s a feature, not a bug. The question is, why would we want such features? Why would we want to allow legislators to be more feckless? Responsibility goes hand in hand with authority and when you don’t have the latter it’s easy to duck the former. Can’t get your campaign promises passed? Blame the other chamber. Need an excuse for how unpopular tax changes got enacted? Blame the other chamber. In a unicameral system voters can elect a majority with a mandate. If the incumbents fail to carry out their platform, voters know exactly who to blame.
William Penn’s original frame of government for Pennsylvania was bicameral but was just too burdensome on a colony trying to get started. The Charter of Liberties in 1701 allowed for a unicameral assembly for both the colony proper and a 2nd one for the lower counties (Delaware). So before the Declaration of Independence 11 out of 13 colonies were bicameral.
State or federal, it limits government power, which is a good thing. It should be hard to pass laws–this should prevent, or at least reduce the number of, bad laws being enacted.
I think fewer laws= fewer bad laws is simplistic. Bicameralism changes the legislative process which influences the laws themselves. Burdensome lawmaking favors the special interests. The more hoops you have to jump through to enact legislation the more opportunities for the power and money of the interests to sculpt laws in ways the public would not approve. Indeed, the more complicated things are the harder it is for the public to follow politics at all. Unicameralism means a more open and comprehensible lawmaking. Bicameralism means more backroom deals.
All interests are special interests, and the absence of the deliberative process can leave the legislators with profoundly inaccurate information while allowing them to follow the whims of public opinion.
I do not understand how having two bodies would increase the number of backroom deals when ruling by simple majority would ease that process by lowering the bar.
Unicameral chambers do deliberate. Here’s a link to the process in Nebraska ((link). It’s not like they just read bills and then vote on them.
“Special interests” can be defined as you say but then what is the use of the term? It seems like far too many use the term simply to refer to interests that they don’t like. Personally I use it to refer to interests which don’t have a popular backing, whether I think they are worthwhile or not. Usually this means they are backed by money or you wouldn’t hear about them but not necessarily. NAMBLA is a special interest without deep pockets, for instance.
When you want to pass legislation you need support from party leaders, committee chairs, regular committee members, rules committee member, and the like. These people don’t just automatically give you what you want just because they like your idea. Even if they don’t oppose it you have to convince them your idea is worth putting on the agenda which is limited after all. In a bicameral system you have to do all of this twice and then also convince the members who sit on the conference committees not to gut your bill so close to the finish. At any step along the way a special interest can impede progress with their influence over a handful of legislators or even a single key member.
The OP premise seems flawed to me. Bicameral’s purpose isn’t to weaken the legislature relative to the other branch. Any statement about what the Founding Father wanted is suspect to me - they were a group of individuals, not a monolithic mind sync entity.
The compromise between representation by population versus representation by geographic area still has some merit. It reflects the traditional ying-yang between majority rule and protecting the minority.
The relative terms are to make one body more responsive to the public and the other independent of fads.
In summary the faults of bicameral cited are actually well thought out design features as pointed out up thread.
You would be pretty unhappy if there was no Senate, and the GoP controlled House was free to do whatever they wanted, wouldn’t you? I’d be pretty upset if liberals were in charge. That’s why two houses are a good thing, and hurdles to filter out bad ideas are good things. Government power is an awesome force. It should be wielded sparingly, with due deliberation.
[QUOTE=Martin Hyde;14647212
That’s in theory, in practice there is no good argument for getting rid of the Senate in the United States. The big argument I’m seeing is “how can you justify someone in Arkansas receiving a better Constituent-to-Representative ratio than someone in California or New York!” Well, it’s easy to justify because nowhere in our Constitution or our national history has it even been suggested a goal or even a desired situation in American government is for representation on a constituent-to-representative basis be equalized across all fifty states.
.[/QUOTE]
Ah what does that have to do with anything? I doubt it has never been suggested. A lot of people do. The powers in charge aren’t going to suggest it, because they would be cutting their own throat. I am an H/R manager, do you think I would ask people, if they wanted to lose their jobs, they’d agree to it?
Lots of academics have studied this and Nebraska adopted a one house legislature. It still is blatantly unfair a person in WY or DE counts more than TX or CA.
The principle of one man one vote, was rules acceptable by the Supreme Court for the states in the 60s. Some states had legislatures by counties or other non population proportional division. The Supreme Court said this was unfair and wrong.
The more levels of government you have, the harder it is to get anything done. There’s a difference between a check and a roadblock.
Look at where I work, no matter what we buy we have to
- Get three bids
- Submit to purchasing manager, get purchase order
- Sign by controller
- Re-submit to purchasing manager for control
- Send to GM to sign off on
- Place in purchasing manager’s box who will order, (When he gets around to it)
This is why it takes 6 months to get ink replaced in a calculator. We can’t buy any till we run out and when we run out, by the time we get new, we have to make do without for months.
It’s similar with government. The more levels, the harder it is to do anything
Again, the CHECKS we once had are now ROADBLOCKS. This is not a good thing.
The past is the past, you can’t make a point by saying, this is the way it was in the past, so why change.
Actually I think it’s better to have the parties alternate control of the legislature rather than have one party control one part and the other the other. I’m not a fan of the Frankensteinian compromises that come out of divided government. It’s like they are cobbled together from the worst ideas of both sides. Better to have a true test of ideology, IMO. Let the electorate vote in a party with the power to enact their platform and then live with the results. You get a clearer view of each party and hopefully a more responsible electorate as well since they would be able to see a direct connection between their votes and governmental policy. I’m confident that my ideology would stand up well. (At least those portions of it popular enough to have a chance of being enacted). And on the contrary the GOP’s priorities wouldn’t fare so well were they brought out of the shadows for everyone to see.
From the OP:
Just to chime in from the Cornhusker state: In my 37 years living in Nebraska, I have heard exactly two people say our state should go to a bicameral legislature. One was a crazy old coot from my hometown who was confusing unicameralism with nonpartisanism; the other was my blowhard third cousin visiting from Oklahoma. I think they’re both dead now.
There is essentially no desire to move back to bicameralism in our very conservative state.
It also forces more compromise and debate on laws. Which can insure that a majority who has taken one house based on some popular passion can’t immediately institute a series of radical legislation.
The founders of our country and the colonies before them were generally pretty smart guys who had seen the problems with radicalism. Even before the French Revolution which just confirmed the problems with radicalism, history had shown when radicals take over government and there are no road blocks to them doing whatever they want, the results are rarely good for society.
Very few issues have majority backing from most of the population.
For example how many Americans care if members of the UAW keep their jobs? Since the vast majority of Americans aren’t autoworkers, I imagine very few aside from people who work in related industries that would be negatively impacted by the UAW’s workers losing their jobs.
So that means by its nature when the UAW lobbies congress it isn’t supporting a majority position. But is that a bad thing? It’s easy to shit on lobbying efforts but I’ve never understood why, if there are 500,000 people who have like interests and decide to pool money and resources to create a formal organization to more effectively represent their interests to the legislature why that is a bad thing. That actually seems to me to be a good feature, not something to try and eliminate.
Or rather, what’s the “idealized alternative.” On legislation that would affect the UAW is the desire that politicians be left to make their “independent decisions” and be “insulated” from influence from organized representatives of their constituents?
Unless the legislator is a subject-matter expert on the piece of legislation before them (which happens but is rare, given the huge range of issues a legislator will face), I actually want Congress to be hearing from the parties that will be affected by their legislation and who actually know about the issues.