Recent reports that members of Speaker Newt Gingrich's own leadership team have considered asking Gingrich to resign from the Speakership and reports that Speaker Gingrich is slightly less popular in public opinion polls than the Internal Revenue Service suggest a remarkable contrast with Sam Rayburn. With the exception of four years when the Republicans controlled the House and Joe Martin was Speaker, Sam Rayburn served in that position from 1940 until his death in 1961. In reality due to the poor health of Speaker Bankhead, Sam Rayburn functioned as Speaker without the title from 1936-1940 when he was Majority Leader. During the time, Sam Rayburn's leadership of the House was never challenged. How can it be that Rayburn served so long without a challenge to his leadership and Gingrich, only Speaker for a little more than two years, is in trouble. 

In part, of course, it is because we are in a different time, a different era in Congressional history. However, the vast differences in the two men cannot be overlooked. When Sam Rayburn became Speaker in 1940, he had already served in important positions of leadership. He had been Majority Leader and Chairman of the Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee, at that time one of the most important positions in the House. He had also served in Congress since 1913. Speaker Gingrich, on the other hand, gained his strength in the House not as a legislator, but as a media-wise critic of the institution of the House and especially of Speaker Jim Wright. As Sam Rayburn was fond of saying: "Anyone can tear down a barn, but it takes a carpenter to build one." Gingrich's background as a critic provided him little in the way of background preparation for the leadership. 

The styles of the two men are strikingly different as well. Although there were reporters Rayburn liked such as Bascom Timmons and Cecil Dickson, generally Rayburn shied away from the public eye. He especially disliked television and would rarely be seen on television talk shows of the era such as "Face the Nation." Gingrich, on the other hand, is probably the most media involved Speaker ever and frequently is quoted in the press and appears on television. The problem is that media attention does not necessarily translate into public support. He has made a number of well-covered and embarrassing gaffes in the course of being the center of media attention. 

Most importantly, the styles of operation of the two men with the House differ sharply. While Rayburn said he was "a Democrat without prefix, suffix, or apology," he maintained close friendships across the aisle. Perhaps his closest friends in his long political career were the Republican leaders Bert Snell and later Joe Martin. Rayburn did not get along nearly as well with Charlie Halleck, the successor to Martin, but he still maintained a good, generally friendly relationship with him. Gingrich, it is reported on the other hand, and the Democratic leader, Richard Gephart, barely speak to one another. Additionally, Rayburn kept friendships and lines of communication open with all segments of the Democrat party. He had northern friends and southern friends, liberal friends and conservative friends. Amazingly, Rayburn could work with the hot-tempered, ultra-conservative, Georgian Gene Cox and could also work with, and be admired by, the liberal Californian James Roosevelt. Gingrich has trouble maintaining close ties with both the conservative and the moderate wings of the Republican Party. 

In light of the recent attempt by Republicans to force Gingrich's resignation, it is also interesting to note that Sam Rayburn leaders, especially John McCormack and Carl Albert, were men of unquestioned loyalty to Rayburn. Gingrich can not say the same about his leaders in the House. 

Such differences between the Gingrich and Rayburn leadership styles bode poorly for Gingrich's speakership and for his chance of having a long tenure in office. 

Reprinted from Speak, Mister Speaker, No. 3, June 1997, with the permission of The Sam Rayburn Library 

During this year's session of the Washington legislature, a mocking custom took hold among some of the conservative lobbyists who spend their time in Olympia. Instead of calling Senator Dan MacDonald the majority leader, which he is, they started referring to him as the "majority follower." Clyde Ballard, the House speaker, they tagged as the "House listener." 

The lobbyists were not happy with the way the session was going. Bills they hoped would sail through the Republican-controlled House and Senate were getting stuck in committee or dying on the floor. Proposals they had waited years to see take tangible form were going nowhere because weak-kneed, anxious to please leadership had produced a legislature that was incapable of expressing its conservative essence. 

So, at least, went the complaint. But if it was a bit surprising to find a set of Republican lobbyists griping about a Republican legislature, what was even more noteworthy was the timing. This year's session of the Washington legislature was actually one of the more productive in memory. 

For the first time in 40 years, legislators were able to complete work on a budget without having to go beyond the constitutionally assigned date of adjournment. The budget itself rose by the smallest amount, in percentage terms, since 1971. The legislature passed a new welfare law, cut taxes on business and recast the juvenile justice system, blending harsher penalties with increased spending on drug abuse and crime-prevention initiatives. And it did all this despite the prolific veto pen of Washington's Democratic governor, Gary Locke. 

But Olympia's conservatives did have a point. The work done by the legislature this year bore relatively little resemblance to the agenda that the Republicans brought to the Capitol when they stormed to control of the state House in 1995. That agenda included anti-abortion laws, dramatic property tax cuts, a rollback of the state's Growth Management Act, and punitive measures aimed at lobbyists for local government. 

None of those bills became law in 1995 and 1996, in the first two years of a Republican House, and none became law in 1997, after the Senate had come into GOP hands as well. Even worse, dreams of concentrating the full weight of power on the right were broken by the 1996 gubernatorial vote that elected Locke in place of a Christian Right Republican activist. 

Given the context, it's easy enough to understand why conservative lobbyists have been in a sour mood in Olympia all year. As it turns out, though, Washington is not the only state where conservatives are disgruntled these days. What stands out about this year's legislative sessions in much of the country is not what happened, but what did not happen. Three years into the state equivalent of the "Gingrich Revolution" that jolted Congress in 1994, Republican-run legislatures have yet to produce the fundamental shift to the right that seemed imminent after the successes in the past two election cycles. 

It's not necessarily that they don't have the numbers. After the 1994 election brought them to virtual parity with Democrats among the membership in the 99 legislative chambers nationwide (and gave them a clear majority of all legislators outside the South), Republicans lost only a bit of that ground in 1996, and continue to boast a majority of the nation's governorships. And clearly they have had their effect on state government, passing tax cuts, toning down environmental regulation and enacting a set of welfare reform packages that many of their colleagues across the aisle would rather not have seen proposed in the first place. 

But there is no mistaking the feeling, among Republican activists stretching from the small-business community to the religious right, that there is something disappointing about it all. In 1995, in the immediate aftermath of the electoral earthquake, it was perfectly plausible for them to argue that the real revolution was bound to take a little while to develop. In 1996, as legislatures adjourned without enacting a coherent conservative agenda, it was arguable that one more election cycle might be necessary to bring the revolution home. In 1997, in the third year of Republican strength at the legislative level, it is getting harder to shake the suspicion that no real revolution is in the cards. 

In several states, most notably Kansas, social conservatives who had anticipated that this would be the year for dramatic new limits on abortion found their issue moving slowly. In other places, proponents of large tax cuts had to scale back their wishes when it became clear that they could not pass. And in many states, clear-cut efforts to slash the reach of state government went nowhere. All this has become a source of constant tension and wrangling, and as in Congress, the wrangling is fraternal, not partisan. It is the division between moderate and conservative Republicans that has bruised egos, frustrated leaders, annoyed hard-core Republican constituencies and, in the end, yielded measured, not radical, change. In many states with Republican majorities, the forces of cut-government-to-the-bone conservatism have been stymied by their own party leaders urging a less far-reaching course. 

None of this should be especially surprising. "It's built into the legislative process," says Karl Kurtz of the National Conference of State Legislatures. "It is a deliberative process that generally prevents extreme actions, that demands compromise and, even with the most powerful majority, that guarantees that conflicting viewpoints are heard." 

This has been a year in which Republicans who had spent years in the minority came face to face with the gap between their long-frustrated hopes and the complicated reality of enacting laws. It delineated for them the difference between expecting the ideal and settling for the attainable, between running roughshod over the opposition and piecing together a majority, between damn-the-torpedoes lawmaking and respecting institutional culture. In short it was a session that clarified the difference between revolution and governance. 

Nowhere was this clearer than in Oregon, where the 1997 legislative session focused on a nasty feud between the House and the Senate--both under Republican control but dramatically different in ideological temperament. The voice of conservative revolution was the Senate, where Republicans held a 20-10 majority. There, the ability to set the agenda and shape legislation was firmly in the hands of GOP conservatives, who were led by Senate President Brady Adams. From the start of the session, their priorities were straightforward: They had no desire to deal with Senate Democrats, they had no intention of letting Democratic Governor John Kitzhaber raise either taxes or the budget, and they were interested above all in rolling back the reach of state government. 

But the situation was far less clear-cut in the House. There, the GOP had only 31 members to the Democrats' 29. This meant not only that the Democrats had to be considered a major factor on any given issue but also that any Republican who had a difference with the party line needed to be heard out as well. 

To make matters worse, there were multiple Republican factions in the House. In addition to a group of about 10 confirmed social and small-government conservatives, there were old-line rural conservatives, most of them from eastern Oregon; more middle-of-the-road suburbanites from western Oregon; and Chuck Carpenter and Jim Hill, a pair of Portland-area mavericks who were as sympathetic to the Democrats as to their own GOP caucus. 

It was Carpenter, for instance, who sent his fellow Republicans into a frenzy when he threatened to lift a bill prohibiting discrimination against gays out of the Judiciary Committee, where it was being bottled up, and to take it directly to the floor, an open challenge to Speaker Lynn Lundquist's power. 

Disregarding pressure from his staff and other Republicans to punish Carpenter, Lundquist instead persuaded him to allow the bill to be sent to another committee, which eventually did send it to the floor, where it passed. The Senate simply ignored it. 

Given those dynamics, it was inevitable that the two houses would clash, in no small part because each leader had no choice but to operate from a different place on the political spectrum: Lundquist had to find ground in the center in order for the House to function, while Adams, both by inclination and necessity, had to keep his Senate right wing happy. The result was a sort of combat-by-petulance, with each house threatening--and sometimes carrying out its threat--to deep-six the other's pet legislation. 

The House passed a much-anticipated transportation measure to fund new highway construction and mass transit programs, only to watch the bill go down in the Senate. The Senate pushed legislation boosting private schools, but the House stymied it. The House insisted on expanded funding for pubic education--an issue of some passion for moderate Republicans in Portland's fast-growing suburbs--only to watch the Senate refuse even to consider the idea. The Senate's attempts to cut state spending went nowhere in the House. 

And so it went. A joke went around the House chamber to the effect that Senate bills would make fine substitutes for clay pigeons at the biannual legislative skeet shoot. Meanwhile, a frustrated Senate conservative complained that Lundquist "couldn't lead 30 members to the bathroom." 

"The speaker's got an impossible job because of the wide disparity of people," said one of the Senate's leaders, Ken Baker, as the session drew to a close. "But if he knew what he was doing, the first time someone got off the reservation he should have trashed him--taken him in a back room and hit the wall a few times. Instead, he allowed coalitions to form in which anyone who had his own personal agenda could hold things up. Once they realized one person could control things, you got 31 speakers." 

Not surprisingly, Lundquist rejected the notion out of hand. "When you have a body that's divided as closely as ours, particularly with the fact that we really didn't have a true 31, the only style that can be effective is one that can bridge those diversities and be willing to really--not just philosophically, but in reality--build consensus," he explained after the session was over. "I could have taken Carpenter and Hill off their chairmanships, but if I had, that would have precluded any potential of getting any issue through where we needed 31 Republican votes." 

In the end, Lundquist's approach prevailed--although Adams insists that had the Senate not acted as it did, state spending would have been even higher. The Senate did manage to prevent Kitzhaber from creating new taxes and fees to support the state parks system, and it managed to make teachers more accountable for their performance in the classroom. Even so, the final budget compromise that emerged after negotiations with Kitzhaber looked far more like the moderate House product than the austere Senate version, especially on funding for education, which in Oregon has essentially become a state responsibility. 

Ideology was not the only force that divided Republican-controlled legislatures this year. Stylistic differences--basic to the nature of each institution--worked to mute the strength of conservatives as well. 

This was especially true in Iowa, where several key issues that might have been resolved easily instead tied up the two houses for a long time. The first involved a proposal for a sweeping cut in the state's income tax. Although there were Republicans who were pushing for a 20 percent across-the-board giveback, the House settled relatively quickly on a 15 percent cut. In the Senate, however, there were much stronger differences of opinion. 

Some senators were anxious just to settle on a straight tax cut and get it over with, but others worried that 15 percent might be too much in the event of an economic downturn, and still others wanted to focus not on tax cuts but on reforming the income-tax structure as a whole. With the Senate's tradition of giving its members wide latitude to state their positions and to deal with each other as horse-trading equals, the GOP caucus tied itself in knots trying to come up with a position its members could agree on. Eventually, the legislature arrived at a compromise 10 percent cut, much too small for many activist conservatives. 

The same dynamic surfaced on drug testing, which was a priority of the Republicans' business backers and which enjoyed strong support among Iowans. Once again, the House finished quickly, passing a proposal that included random testing. In the Senate, though, the measure ran into determined opposition from three Republicans, all of them prominent members of a moderate faction that has tangled in the past with the state's conservative party leadership. 

One of the three rebels on drug testing was Jack Rife, who had been minority leader but was passed over for the majority leadership by conservative GOP leaders. Taking advantage of Democratic opposition, Rife and his allies were able to keep the drug measure from passing at all--once again provoking House members to shake their heads at the Senate's insistence on giving individuals the autonomy to frustrate conservative goals. 

In part, of course, the problem was a matter of learning how to be a majority. Although the House went Republican in 1992, the Senate did not shift columns until last year, when Republicans were given charge of the whole legislature for the first time since 1982. "After being in the minority for 14 years," says Libby Jacobs, a moderate House Republican, "Suddenly you're in charge of setting an agenda, of running the committees, of learning to set up a schedule, of getting bills through. The learning curve is incredibly steep for a group of people who are suddenly in charge." 

But the session also drove home the realization that the House and Senate are different institutions, and that even more than ideological differences, their different cultures can override the shared Republican label. The Senate is driven by personalities, history, and informal relationships, and party unity for its own sake is not valued as highly as it is in the House. For younger Republican conservatives in both bodies, this was an eyeopener. "We felt when we got a Republican Senate, the horse-trading would end," says Steve Churchill, one of the House members who pushed hardest for big tax cuts. "It has changed some, but what I found was that regardless of which party controls the Iowa Senate, their decisions are based much more on relationships and power than they are on merit." 

Bickering between Republican legislative chambers was a major part of the conservative frustration in many places in 1997. But it wasn't the only aspect of the story. There were some places where Republican legislators got along beautifully--and still made little progress on a conservative agenda. 

In Washington State, for instance, relations between the House and the Senate weren't just friendly, they were at times close to incestuous. On the budget in particular, the chairmen of the two budget-writing committees worked together daily, and differences were hammered out quickly. The problem in Washington was tension between the Republican majority and several of the key conservative constituencies. 

These emerged in no small part because legislative leaders adopted a conscious strategy of trying to focus on one goal--pushing a Republican-stamped product past Governor Locke, who actually took office a few days after the legislature convened. This meant allowing moderate as well as right-leaning GOP legislators a piece of the action. "I try to give everyone a horse to ride out on," Speaker Ballard explains. "Scripture says, 'If you want to be a leader, you must become a servant.' You just have to respect people." 

But this attitude, while it left the Republicans' diverse membership happy, rankled lobbyists and other conservatives who preferred the more activist approach of the 1995 House. That year, the resurgent House Republicans waded through their "Contract with Washington," voting to roll back past Democratic initiatives on health care, passing a "three strikes" crime law, and slashing property taxes, only to see these measures die in a Democratic Senate. This year there was no longer a Democratic Senate, but that was irrelevant, because the conservative agenda didn't even make it past the Republican House. An anti-gay-marriage bill went down to defeat there, and the GOP leadership refused even to deal with two measures reining in government bureaucracies: an attempt to rewrite a failed 1995 property-rights referendum to take into account criticisms that doomed it with the voters, and a bid to keep lobbyists for cities, counties and school districts from using pubic funds for their work. 

From the leadership's point of view, there was little point in sending the Democratic governor bills he could successfully veto. The legislature tried that at the start of the session, when the Republicans passed a set of property tax cuts that went further than Locke was willing to allow, and he promptly vetoed them, along with legislation easing state regulation of water rights. After that round of sparring, the GOP leaders concluded that if the legislature was to get anything done on issues such as the budget, it could only be in cooperation with the governor. Their decision to opt for a strategy of conciliation rather than confrontation put even more distance between them and hard-core GOP constituencies. 

"The truth is," says Tom McCabe, executive vice president of the Building Industry Association of Washington, "the House did a better job in the previous session. I think Republicans have to distinguish themselves from Democrats, or else they don't get elected." 

In Kansas, too, Republican conservatives found themselves at odds with the governor. In this case, however, the governor was a moderate Republican, Bill Graves. And, working with the moderate GOP leadership of the Senate and a smaller, like-minded faction in the House, Graves was able to deny the activist right most of what it wanted in the legislative session 

As in Iowa, conservatives came to power after the 1994 elections, when Tim Shallenburger took over the House speakership from longtime GOP incumbent Robert Miller. Though Shallenburger himself is a canny, experienced politician, many of the more conservative members of his caucus are new, and impatient for change. The result, especially early in this year's session, was that Shallenburger found himself treading a careful line between accommodating Graves and keeping conservatives happy, mostly through such symbolic gestures as stripping a moderate leader of his position on the Appropriations Committee and keeping moderate members--literally, in the case of one legislator's office--in the broom closet. 

Interestingly enough, although the most dramatic splits among Republicans occur over social issues, the legislature did not burn itself up over them. Last session, Graves had vetoed strong anti-abortion legislation; this time, he accepted a slight tightening of restriction. "Issues like abortion are fairly well defined, and people take defined stands on them," says Kent Glasscock, a leader of the moderate Republican faction in the House, "so while they are emotional, they don't tend to grind the session to a halt." 

Instead, as in Iowa, the focus of controversy became the size and nature of tax cuts. Conservatives in Kansas over the past few years have been pressing for dramatic cuts in revenue, on the theory that if you shrink revenues enough when times are good--and it is an easy political move to make--it will force decision makers in leaner times down the road to cut expenditures. Graves, who had proposed a range of modest cuts, argued that this would be fiscally imprudent. And in the end, he got his way despite conservatives' control of the House. 

Within both the Republican and the Democratic caucuses, sharp divisions arose over the nature and extent of tax cuts--so sharp, in fact, that the House deadlocked hopelessly until Graves stepped in. And, of course, once he did so, he was able to insist that moderates in both parties be at the table, and be a part of the compromise that eventually got hammered out. 

Nor is there any sign that future sessions will be any easier on Republican conservatives--at least not as long as their party remains in power. "The reality is, it's very hard to govern," says Kent Glasscock. "Any team, whether it's a team of Democrats or conservative Republicans or moderate Republicans or football players or horses, it is very difficult to get everyone pulling together all the time. When the team is made up of people with divergent backgrounds and viewpoints, then you've got to recognize and appreciate over time that governing is a collective process that our founding fathers wisely made resoundingly frustrating. It's that frustration that wears on people, but it's probably also that frustration that keeps us, as a state, between the white lines." 

Governing, November 1997 
Reprinted with permission, Governing magazine, copyright 1997 

Twenty states limit the terms of state lawmakers. These limits are summarized below. The constitutional (C) or statutory (S) locations of these limits are parenthetically cited. 

• Arizona: Limits state lawmakers to four consecutive two-year terms and members of the executive branch to two consecutive four-year terms. (C - Article IV, Part 2, Section 21)
• Arkansas: Restricts statewide elected officials to two four-year terms, state representatives to three two-year terms and state senators to two four-year terms. (C- Amendment 73)
• California: Limits state lawmakers to three two-year terms in the Assembly and two four-year terms in the Senate. Constitutional officers are limited to two four-year terms. (C)- Article IV, Section 2)
• Colorado: Limits state lawmakers to four consecutive two-year terms in the House and two consecutive four-year terms in the Senate. (C - Article V, Section 3)
• Florida: Restricts an individual from running for re-election to the Legislature, executive branch or U.S. Congress if by the end of their current term they have served for eight consecutive years. (C - Article VI, Section 4)
• Idaho: State legislators and statewide-elected officials are limited to eight years in a 15-year period. (S - ID ST 34-907)
• Louisiana: Limits members of the House and Senate to three consecutive four-year terms. (C - Article III, Section 4-E)
• Maine: Restricts state legislators and constitutional officers to four consecutive two-year terms in each body. The state auditor is limited to two consecutive four-year terms. Restrictions on state lawmakers become effective with the 1996 elections and apply to individuals currently holding office. Applies to time served by senators and representatives beginning January 1, 1995. (S - ME ST T. 21-A, Section 553)
• Massachusetts: Limits governor, lt. governor, secretary, treasurer, auditor or attorney general to two consecutive terms within an 11-year period. Limits state senators and representatives to four consecutive terms in nine years. (S - MGLA Chapter 53, Section 48) Note: A 1997 decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Court invalidated that state's term limit statute.
• Michigan: Limits state representatives to three terms, state senators and members of the executive branch may serve only two terms. (C - Article IV, Section 54)
• Missouri: Restricts state lawmakers to eight years in the same house and 16 years total of legislative service. (C - Article 3, Section 8)
• Montana: Restricts state senators, state representatives and state officials to eight years in a 16-year period. (C - Article IV, Section 8)
• Nebraska: Had limited state legislators to two consecutive terms in office. (C - Article III, Section 8) Nebraska Supreme Court in February 1996 voided the provisions.
• Nevada: Limits members of the Assembly to serving 12 years or six terms and members of the Senate to three terms or 12 years. Secretary of state, state treasurer, state comptroller and attorney general are limited to eight years or two terms. Governor is already limited to two consecutive terms. (C - Article 4, Sections 3 and 4; Article 5, Section 19; Article 15, Section 3)
• Ohio: Limits state senators to two consecutive terms and state representatives to four consecutive terms. Limits members of the executive branch to two consecutive terms. Terms are considered consecutive unless there is a break of four years. (C - Article II, Section 2)
• Oklahoma: Restricts state lawmakers to 12 years of legislative service. (C - Article 5, Section 17-A)
• Oregon: Holds state lawmakers to six years in the House and eight years in the Senate or no more than 12 years of legislative service. Statewide officeholders are limited to eight years. (C - Article II, Section 19)
• South Dakota: Limits state lawmakers to four consecutive two-year terms in each house and statewide officers to two consecutive terms. (C - Article III, Section 6)
• Utah: Prohibits state officers and members of the House and Senate from placing their names on the ballot if they have served more than 12 consecutive years in office. (S - UCA 20A-10-201)
• Washington: Limits state senators to eight out of 14 years, representatives to six out of 12 years, and the governor and lt. governor to eight out of 14 years. Terms served before November 1992 will not count toward limits. (S - RC WA Section 44.04.015)
• Wyoming: Limits state senators to three terms in any 24-year period, representatives to six terms in any 24-year period, and constitutional officers to two terms in any 16-year period. (S - WSA Section 22-5-103)

Countdown Starts for Term-Limited Lawmakers  

Term limits are here and now. For 52 of the nation's 2,615 state legislators subject to term limits the end of their terms arrived in 1996. In Maine, 26 of 151 members of the House and four of 35 members of the Senate were ineligible to run for re-election in 1996. In California, 22 of the Assembly's 80 members could not run for re-election. 

The tempo will increase dramatically in 1998 when time runs out for another 248 members in the California, Missouri and Montana Senates, the Colorado House and Senate, and the Arkansas, Michigan, Oregon, and Washington House chambers. 

The 1998 term limit casualty list hits hardest in the Arkansas, Michigan and Washington Houses. Half of Arkansas' 100 House members, 67 of Michigan's 110 members and 32 of 98 members in Washington are serving their final terms. The Oregon House will lose 22 of its 60 members in 1998. In California, the numbers are 16 of 80 in the Assembly and 11 of 40 in the Senate. Colorado's House will lose 18 of its 65 legislators, the Senate nine of 35 members. In Maine, 11 House members and one senator cannot run in 1998. One of Missouri's 34 senators will not be eligible to run in 1998 because of an earlier special election. In the Montana Senate, 10 of 50 members are precluded from running for re-election in 1998. 

Predicting the number of members of any legislative body who will be subject to term limits beyond 1998 is guesswork, because of resignations, deaths, incumbents who may be defeated, special elections or other reasons for changes. Assuming no changes, for example, the remaining 66 members of the Washington House who will be eligible for re-election in 1998 would all be term limited by 2002. And in the California Assembly the comparable numbers would be 34 in 2000 and 30 in 2002. But there is nothing stable about those, or any other, numbers. In term limit states, incumbent legislators are resigning or choosing not to run for re-election before the new laws take effect. That was particularly true in Maine and California in 1996. 

*A federal court ruling that California's term limit provisions are unconstitutional is on appeal. 

**Because of special elections, term limits would be effective in 2001 for five current members of the House and one Senator in 1998. 

Source: National Conference of State Legislatures 

Website: http://www.ncsl.org/programs/legman/about/termlim.htm#sixstates 

Last Update: 10/8/97 

Contact for More Information: Tommy Neal (Tommy.Neal@NCSL.ORG) 

"Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics," the political scientist Wallace Sayre once wrote, "because the stakes are so low." 

Anybody who has ever been to graduate school has heard that aphorism, and knows exactly what it means. Professors don't have a lot of momentous public decisions to make, so they argue about small ones, fighting to the death over points of scholarly arcana and personal status and privilege. The less it all matters, the louder they tend to shout. 

It's a devastating piece of truth, but is doesn't just apply to academics. It applies to virtually every institution in modern life--including government. Deliberative bodies that have little pressing work to do--or indulge the luxury of avoiding it--find ways to use up their energy on disputes that appear from the outside to be nothing more than petty personal quarrels. Put some immediate decisions in front of them, and they start behaving better, solving problems instead of just blathering on about them. 

I may be taking Sayre further than he ever wanted to go, but I think that if you apply his principle broadly enough, you can use it to explain a great deal of what is going on in American politics in the 1990s. In particular, you can use it to explain some of the more puzzling behavioral quirks of the U.S. Congress and the 50 state legislatures. 

When Congress went home for the holidays a few weeks ago, its leadership proclaimed that the 1997 session had been one of the most productive in years. If I were speaker of the House, I suppose I would say that, too. But watching from across town, and with no particular ax to grind, it's hard to escape the conclusion that Congress did almost nothing of consequence in 1997. Its one highly touted achievement, a resolution to balance the budget by 2002, is just a promise, not a piece of legislation. Besides, the budget is virtually in balance now without it, and it's not clear whether the agreement will ultimately make the problem better or worse. 

The limited amount of important business Congress was actually scheduled to do in 1997, it managed to postpone. It was supposed to rewrite ISTEA, the national transportation law, which expired in September, but it didn't even come close to finishing that project before going home. 

Nor did it complete action on its past-due reauthorization of basic federal housing programs. The last such authorization ran out five years ago. The interim measure enacted to cover for it on a short-term basis ran out two years ago. So it's time they did some serious work here. But it will be next spring, at the earliest, before they manage to get a housing bill enacted into law. 

If the members of Congress weren't doing these basic chores, you might ask what they were doing. But if you are even a casual watcher of the evening news, you don't have to ask. You know. They were shouting at each other about matters of little or no legislative importance. They postured and sparred about campaign finance abuses that both parties practice but each is determined to pin on the other. They leaned back in their committee room chairs and pontificated at endless hearings. They fenced with each other over who should be ambassador to Mexico. Their one substantive debate in the closing weeks of the session--on the "fast track" trade question--was, in fact, a debate on how much of their trade jurisdiction they should give away. 

I've never been a Congress basher, and it isn't my purpose now to moralize about what a deplorable situation this is. I accept it. This is what Congress does. I mention it only to make a point that I think Wallace Sayre would make if he were around to make it. Congress is so unpleasantly noisy these days not because it has too much to do, but because it has too little. It is becoming more and more like a college political science department. 

Over the past decade, without ever quite admitting it, we have ceased to rely on Congress (or the federal government, for that matter) to deal with our most serious public problems. The country faces a desperately serious school problem, but no one expects Congress to fix that. Residents of big cities are justifiably preoccupied with the crime rate, but they don't really look to Washington to reduce it. Congress may send them a few extra police, but crime remains a fundamentally local problem. Civil rights is no longer a subject for landmark debate and enactment--it is merely something we're supposed to have a national "conversation" about--and the conversation is so faint you can barely tell if it has started yet. 

More than that, the sense of broad possibility that existed in Congress a generation ago--the sense that there was important work to do and momentous decisions to make--simply doesn't exist at this point. That might seem like a good reason to buckle down and do a good job of handling the less glamorous responsibilities that still need to be met, like rewriting the country's housing and transportation laws. But instead it has the opposite effect. It leads Congress to ignore its routine tasks and find something excitingly trivial to argue about. 

State legislatures have been known to enjoy that kind of self-indulgence as well, but at the moment, many of them simply don't have time for it. Over the past few years, they have been handed a series of genuinely important jobs that they can't slough off even if they want to. 

Welfare reform, of course, is the prime example. In abandoning its commitment to permanent support for poor people, Congress wasn't so much writing a new welfare policy as mandating the states to write one. And to write it quickly, in a matter of months, so that each state would have something coherent on the books before the federal subsidies began to trickle away. 

With a tiny number of exceptions, the states did that in 1997. They wrote rules determining which of their citizens could receive benefits, how long they could continue receiving them, and what they needed to do to demonstrate willingness to work. It was not a pretty process in some legislatures, and one can dispute whether it is the right direction on welfare in the first place. But it has been a serious, constructive debate--not a shouting match. It had to be. There was little choice. 

Even where there has been no gun at their heads, however, the states have been accepting the challenge of dealing with problems that no other level of government is handling. When Congress rejected President Clinton's health care proposal three years ago, it set the stage for drastic changes that have turned the American health care system into a profit-driven automaton that leaves many of its users genuinely upset about the quality of care they are getting. 

There is no simple answer to this problem, but there are legitimate ameliorative improvements, and many state legislatures have been working on them: laws regulating hospital takeovers, banning "drive-through" deliveries and mastectomies, guaranteeing patients as much information as possible about the managed-care companies they trust their lives to. Congress might have done some work on this, but it hasn't gotten around to it. So the states have. 

Not too many years ago, if I had told you that the electric power industry was about to be deregulated, you would have taken it for granted that Congress would be at the center of the process. Indeed, there's no reason why it couldn't be. Earlier this year, the Clinton administration promised legislation on the subject, and the members of Congress began arguing about it, apparently in search of an impasse, which they then found. So no bill has emerged. In the meantime, nearly a dozen states, including California, have moved on their own. By the time Congress takes action, if it ever does, the question of how to deregulated on a federal basis may be all but moot. 

The reversal of roles in American government has taken place gradually and without much fanfare, but it has been dramatic, nevertheless. It has reached the point where few of us bother even looking to Congress as the primary instrument for resolving the contradictions and challenges of modern capitalism. We look to Congress to make noise and entertain us. By and large, that is what it does. 

TO assert this is not to assert that state legislatures or governments have blossomed into models of unerring statesmanship. That notion can be dispelled easily enough by a short visit to Albany, where the personal rivalries of a few legislative leaders held up approval of a $67 billion budget for months beyond the official deadline; or Sacramento, where the most minor issues continue to be viewed through the prism of partisan gamesmanship; or Trenton, where legislators of both parties proclaimed the need to reform the state's convoluted auto insurance system, then proved too timid to undertake it. Watching American legislatures in action can be as frustrating at this point as it has been through most of the nation's history. 

On the other hand, it seems fair to say of most state legislatures and state governments right now that they are meeting at least the primary test of political responsibility: They are taking up complicated issues, and making decisions on them. It would be difficult to make the claim in a plausible way about the U.S. Congress. 

Over a period of time, this role reversal becomes something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more problems the states manage to deal with successfully (or at least conclusively), the more they will be expected to take up. And the more problems Congress chooses to avoid solving, the more it will be looked to as the branch of government where quarrelsome blowhards let off steam about matters of modest consequence--sort of like the clusters of academic jealousy Wallace Sayre was talking about. 

Reprinted with permission, Governing magazine, copyright 1998