Should the legislature be allowed to meet every year?
Posted on Sunday, October 26, 2008
Less than f ifty years ago,
congressmen had part-time
jobs in Washington: they
were often able to finish their federal work in June and come home for the balance of the year. They were tied to the communities they represented through work, home, family, school and neighborhood. Today, our fulltime Congress makes Congressmen tied primarily to Washington, although federal legislators are able to make secondary, brief campaign appearances back home. These days, it’s much too easy for legislators to become disconnected from their constituents and get overly comfortable working with D. C. lobbyists and government bureaucrats.
Do you want our state legislaturethe chief policymaking body for nearly three million Arkansans—to look more like Congress ? Then have I got a deal for you ! If you think Congress is doing a great job and you want our state legislature to follow suit, then you should vote for Proposed Constitutional Amendment 2. Right now, our state legislature meets for a few months every two years. This proposed constitutional amendment will allow the legislature to go into session every year—twice as often as it has.
Amendment 2 isn’t getting discussed much, but it is without a doubt the biggest and most consequential change in Arkansas government in my lifetime. Let me tell you why making this change is a terrible idea.
Government in Arkansas should be small and non-intrusive, and our state’s legislators should work hard to limit their own taxing and spending. The time our legislature spends in session needs to be limited, so that legislative attention is concentrated on matters of only the greatest importance. But having annual legislative sessions will accomplish just the reverse of these conservative Arkansas values.
Annual sessions will make it harder for our representatives to be citizens of their districts. Annual sessions will create tremendous pressure for pay increases and higher travel allowances for legislators, who will find it harder and harder to have real jobs that, every year, allow four months time off. Annual sessions will weaken the connections between the people and those who are supposed to represent them. Annual sessions will attract candidates who seek government sinecures, not private-sector successes. And annual sessions will also give more publicity to incumbent politicians and drain the last vestiges of competitiveness out of our current political campaigns, which are already heavily biased toward incumbent re-election.
Annual sessions will also lead to big government in Arkansas. Political scientists have demonstrated what everybody knows: the longer legislatures are in session, the more legislation they produce—which generally leads to bigger, more expensive and more complex government. States with full-time legislatures generally rank near the top of the list of biggest per-person taxers and spenders. In contrast, our neighborhood state of Texas—which, like Arkansas, has a legislature that only meets every other year—is consistently near the bottom of the list when ranked by per-person taxing and spending.
Anyone who genuinely advocates government that is smaller, cheaper and closer to the people must oppose this change to our state Constitution. I’m reminded of the experience of former South Dakota Senator George McGovern. After almost 20 years as a full-time federal legislator, McGovern tried (and failed ) to run a small business. When discussing his time in both government and business, he famously said: “I wish I had known a little more about the problems of the private sector. I have to pay taxes, meet a payroll: I wish I had a better sense of what it took to do that when I was in Washington.”
More than 200 years ago, George Washington famously compared government to fire, calling it “a dangerous servant and a terrible master.” Our system of part-time sessions is a firebreak to big government, but moving to annual sessions will be an accelerant.
Permitting our legislature to spend twice as much time in session will be a gateway drug to big government—and a recipe for even more uncompetitive elections and unresponsive politicians. A vote for Amendment 2 runs the risk of producing state legislators as disconnected as McGovern admitted he became. I hope Arkansas votes against this Amendment and for our current system of biennial sessions, which gives as much time as possible to lawmakers to be representatives of their districts—not just representatives of that huge marble dome in the center of Little Rock.
Dan Greenberg is a lawyer and state Representative in District 31.
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