things kevin hates

There’s 50 states in the USA. And 49 of them have something horribly wrong with their state governments. The sole exception? Nebraska. And what does Nebraska do right? They have a unicameral state legislature. Uni-what? Instead of having a senate and a house of representatives (or whatever the equivalent names are in various states), they have just a single chamber.

Some background: the US has a Senate and a House of Representatives. As you may or may not remember from your 10th-grade American History class, this was a compromise between the states with small populations (who favored an equal number of seats for each state) and the large states (who favored seats based on population). Eventually Roger Sherman masterminded the Connecticut Compromise, which led to our bicameral federal legislature.*

As you might expect given the bicameral nature of England’s Parliament, the colonies usually had a sort of bicameral legislature, with a representative assembly and a council of high-ranking government officials. (To be honest, I’m pretty much going off the wiki page here as I have no particular recollection of the nature of colonial governments beyond hazy remembrances of Virginia’s House of Burgesses. And apparently, according to wikipedia, Pennsylvania didn’t have a bicameral legislature until 1790.) Now, the need for a bicameral legislature at the federal level is clear: the US Constitution provides for a federal government with a certain amount of deference to the individual states, with the equal representation of the Senate protecting the smaller states from being overrun. One could certainly take issues with this approach, but it’s definitely justifiable.

However, there’s no real federal impulse within a state, so having two houses is just silly, even in theory. People have made arguments on similar grounds to the ones made at the federal level, suggesting that a big city would have too much influence on the rest of the state, but a state isn’t a federation, and no sovereignty is shared between state and county or state and city in the same way that power is shared between the federal government and the states. A state is just a mass of people. Obviously a small town will have different interests from a big city, but that doesn’t mean that small towns should have outsized power in the same way that small states do.

Secondly, this notion was completely blown away (rightly or wrongly) by Reynolds v. Sims, a 1964 Supreme Court decision which, following on the heels of Baker v. Carr, ruled that state legislatures (and both houses) had to have districts proportional to population—the famous “one man, one vote” principle. In other words, having a bicameral legislature became completely and utterly pointless.** It adds extra cost and complexity—why do I need a state representative and a state senator? The extra salaries for the politicians and staffers are unnecessary. Bills can pass through one house, then get hung up in the other one. It’s just plain wasteful.

Unfortunately, politicians have no real incentive to take away their jobs, so a massive wave of unicameralism is unlikely to sweep the nation. But it’d be nice if it did.

* I was just thinking that there should be a sequel to 1776 called 1787. I’d go see it.

** In theory, I suppose some sort of party-based proportional representation, with one house operating like current houses, and the other with every party receiving votes based on its proportion of the vote. But I see no reason why Democrats and Republicans would allow any breach of their two-party system.