I’ve been reading about the Nebraska Legislature which is unique in the Unites States. IMHO, the arguments for having only one chamber for lawmaking are compelling, it’s cheaper and more transparent.
I wonder if going unicameral has at least been contemplated at some point by other states in the Union, especially the smaller ones.
Like most things in the US, blame the British. The US created a bicameral legislature in the Constitution of 1787 because the British had one, with the Senate being the House of Lords. Most US states followed suit. This contratsed with the much more United Provinces inspired Articles of Confederation, which had a single house.
IIRC, Colonial legislatures were often single chamber.
Bicameral makes sense for the federal government. I’ve never understood the point with state governments. Is there any state with an ACTUAL Senate, as in a body made up of say, counties where they get equal representation? Otherwise, they just have two Houses.
There used to be, but not since Reynolds v. Sims in the 1960s.
This is a rather superficial understanding of the reasons behind bicameralism in the US federal government. The Senate does not really resemble the House of Lords in any sense, either in terms of its structure or procedures. It’s true that the bicameral nature of Parliament inspired the Congress’s structure, but it was designed as a compromise solution to the small states problem and not simply because the English had one.
The Congress under the Articles of Confederation and wartime Continental Congresses were unicameral because they were vested with primarily executive powers, with little or highly limited legislative purposes.
The House of Lords of today? True. The House of Lords of 1787, well yes it does. It was intended to be a reviewing chamber, who could decide issues dispassionately, unlike the popularly elected House. Remember at the time the Senate was NOT directly elected. While the small and big states compromise was a major issue, the structure of Congress was clearly inspired by Parliament. They even took gave constitutional force to some Parliamentary conventions, most obviously the Origination Clause. Hell, Madison expressly mentioned British (and other) experiences in the Federalist Papers
Right. Many states used per-county chambers before they were found to violate the one-man-one-vote rule, and the Court ordered that ALL state legislative chambers had to be apportioned by population (the Federal Senate being explicitly constitutionally mandated to provide equal representation per state, is not affected). They can continue to draw legislative districts based on geography or seeking to respect municipal boundaries but then they have to apportion more or fewer seats by population (e.g. the Vermont Senate).
To get back to the OP, I would suggest it’s a combination of desire to avoid problems and simple inertia.
A wider question might be why the state governments all have such similar structures. The most “radical” departure seems to be that Nebraska has a unicameral legislature. All that is required by the constitution is that the state guarantee a “republican form of government”, which gives them a lot of latitude. A state can’t be ruled by a dictator or a hereditary monarch, but it appears that they could, if they wished, set up a parliamentary form, for instance, where the state effectively had something akin to a prime minister as in a parliamentary republic.
I suspect that the states originally hewed as closely as they could to the federal structure simply to avoid any challenges to the “republican form” of their governmental structure. This having happened, inertia and tradition applied to newer states as they ere added.
My personal opinion is that this was a massuve mistake and contributed to bad government. I will try to lay out my reasons for why bicameral state legislatures were a good idea, but it may stray into GD territory.
I wonder which exotic systems would past muster. Say for instance :
-A small-sized “government comitee” cumulating legislative and executive power, with 20 members elected for 20 years, two of them being replaced every 2 years.
-A single governor with full powers (and no legislature at all), elected every three months
-A bicameral system, with a chamber whose members are elected for life, and another chamber whose members are selected at random amongst electors, like in ancient Athens or in modern juries.
-A roman-like executive with two consuls having identical powers and able to cancel each other decisions (preferably the two guys getting the most votes rather than a ticket, so that they’re guaranteed to be on opposite political sides and to agree on almost nothing)
Jessie Ventura wanted MN to go unicameral.
It was debated but there wasn’t a lot of support
Brian
In the very early years some of the original and first-generation states did do some experimenting along the lines of things like Swiss-style collective executives, executive election by the legislature, etc. but by and by they mostly converged on separately-elected presidential executive and bicameral legislature systems for the stated reasons; though of course they did keep some divergences from the federal style, most notably in elected judiciaries and state’s attorneys, and in keeping some separately-elected cabinet members. States admitted later on, or who had to adopt new constitutions later, then would go along with what was already tested rather than reinventing any wheels.
Most states have a House and a Senate because they were copying the US federal government. As to why Nebraska didn’t, I guess they just like being different. Note that they’re also one of only two states that don’t lump all of their electoral votes together.
I suspect a major reason bicameral legislatures are popular in American constitutional design is because they make it harder to pass legislation.
(Now all the foreigners are going “Yeah, that’s what we’re saying…wait, what?”)
One of the most deeply ingrained ideas in American political thought is that of “checks and balances”. It’s what we’re all taught in high school civics, and if the average American can dredge up anything about American political philosophy, that’s likely to be it.
Even if both houses of a state lege are required to be elected by “one person, one vote”, they’re still two separately elected bodies of people. It’s far from unheard of for the houses of a state lege to be rivals (and especially their respective leaders; typically a “speaker” of the lower house, and the state’s lieutenant governor for the state upper house), and this applies even when both houses are controlled by the same political party (and even when the speaker and the lieutenant governor are of the same political party). And now both these–possibly rival, or maybe even controlled by entirely different parties–legislatures have to pass the exact same bill, or else two similar bills have to go to a conference committee of some kind to come up with a compromise between the lower house’s bill and the upper houses’s bill, which will then have to go back and be re-passed by both houses.
There are lots of places in this process where legislation can just quietly die, even if some notion (establishing a state Board of Busybodies to oversee the Thingamajig Industry) seemingly has gotten enough votes to pass. (The state house version and the state senate version of the bill establishing the state Board of Busybodies to oversee the Thingamajig Industry both passed with wide margins, but the two houses’ bills had various diferences, and the conference committee just couldn’t iron out the differences between them, so looks like nothing will happen until next year at the very soonest.)
If you have a political philosophy which is very heavily concerned with making sure government doesn’t run amok and Bad Things don’t happen, all of this is a feature, not a bug.
As a resident, I see the good side and the bad side of a Unicameral legislature.
On the good side, it is officially “non-partisan.” Naturally it does not really work out that way. People are people. It is pretty efficient and transparent as mentioned in the OP.
On the bad side, with a single house, there are fewer checks and balances in our legislative process. The filibuster stalls legislation quite often, and there are a few Senators who abuse their power to the detriment of all.
Dave Barry: “Nebraska is the only state with a bicameral legislature, defined as a legislature that bears its young underwater.”
– from Dave Barry’s Only Travel Guide You’ll Ever Need.
The parliaments of the six Australian colonies (later states) and of New Zealand were all established as bicameral.
Queensland (in 1922) and New Zealand (in 1951) subsequently abolished theirs.
And by ‘theirs’ I meant the upper houses of their parliaments.
Methinks you messed up that joke.
You don’t remember correctly. Eleven of the thirteen colonies had bicameral legislatures. With independence, 12 of the 13 states had bicameral legislatures.
State bicamerals have fuck-all to do with the United States Senate. They were created earlier (for the original 13), for mostly different reasons. They weren’t modeled after the United States Senate, because the United States Senate didn’t exist. The later 37 adopted bicamerals in imitation of the original 13, not of Washington.
I explained more when the same question was posed eight months ago.