Statehouse Reform
Jewell, Malcolm E.
Statehouse Reform The States: United They Fell, by Frank Trippett. World Publishing Company. 232 pp. $5.95. Reviewed by Malcolm E. Jewell Touring the last year or two we have been witnessing...
...And legislators themselves, through the National Conference of State Legislative Leaders, have begun trying to improve their own image and to gain more adequate facilities to perform their job...
...At first glance, The States: United They Fell appears to be simply one more expose of corruption, frivolity, and obsession with trivia in the legislature...
...His book is written in a style that is easy to read, though it is not tightly organized...
...In Trippett's judgment, the major failure of the legislature is that it has ignored the public interest and has been responsive only to what he calls its "true constituency"—a coalition of industrial, commercial, and business interests which reject social and economic reform, seek special benefits from the legislature, and oppose higher taxes other than the regressive sales tax...
...Political scientists have rediscovered the legislature and have been devising new techniques to measure and evaluate its behavior...
...Reapportionment will have little effect because urban-rural differences have been exaggerated and legislatures from both areas have served business interests...
...They suggest providing the legislators with larger and better staffs, more physical facilities, more adequate salaries, and longer sessions...
...In short, the goal is to equip the legislature for the responsibilities of making policy, allocating funds, and overseeing a government that, in many states, spends more than one billion dollars annually...
...Moreover, in many legislatures, some of the strongest vested interests are labor unions, teachers' organizations, and agricultural groups, none of which is a part of the conservative constituency that Trippett has defined and that he claims is dominant in the legislature...
...Probably the most serious oversimplification, pervading the entire book, is Trippett's assumption that there is a single conservative, business constituency dictating legislative decisionmaking...
...Statehouse Reform The States: United They Fell, by Frank Trippett...
...Frank Trippett, a Newsweek journalist whose experience includes covering several state legislatures, is the latest to offer a diagnosis of state legislatures...
...He views corruption as only a symptom of the problem, and he is concerned with investigating "why legislatures behave as they do...
...The problems of conflicts of interest and campaign financing receive somewhat less attention from those interested in reform...
...Trippett makes some valid points, but they are too often overstated and oversimplified...
...Trippett's diagnosis leads him to reject as ineffective most of the reforms that have been suggested in recent years...
...Trippett adds that the state legislatures have historically served these conservative special interests...
...Reviewed by Malcolm E. Jewell Touring the last year or two we have been witnessing a revival of interest in state legislatures, probably precipitated by the Supreme Court's decisions on reapportionment...
...And he is probably correct in concluding that this indifference is not so much a cause as a result of legislative failures...
...Anyone who has observed a state legislature at first hand must realize that much of its time and energy is devoted to settling disputes among competing business interests, large and small...
...But I would argue that reapportionment and other structural reforms will affect the balance of power among competing interests, though they will not necessarily always serve to advance liberal causes...
...Journalists have been writing exposes of legislative corruption and inefficiency...
...Metropolitan problems are already receiving more attention in the legislatures, but metropolitan legislators are not always in agreement on the solution of these problems...
...The aims of the reformers, both inside and outside the legislature, are familiar and not very radical...
...Trippett is certainly right in saying that the public demonstrates a massive indifference to state legislatures...
...But the problem is actually a larger one...
...Public indifference is likely to persist as long as the states simply react to Federal initiatives and fail to provide imaginative answers to the problems —particularly metropolitan problems— of modern society...
...Constitutional and statutory reforms designed to strengthen the legislature's independent power and equip it with better facilities will simply permit the legislature to serve conservative interests in a modern, efficient fashion...
...But Trippett is critical of journalists who "stick close to the spectacular and scandalous and sensational in legislative activity...
...Citizen groups, spurred on by the Citizens Conference on State Legislatures, have been organizing and devising proposals for reform...
...The people have shown more interest in the policies of the national government, and, in some cases, local governments, because they recognize the direct impact of these policies on their lives, while the consequences of state policies remain hazy...
...The foundations have begun to provide support for study and reform...
...I agree that the policy implications of reapportionment have been exaggerated and that it is unrealistic to expect legislative reforms to be meaningful unless they affect the power structure...
Vol. 31 • November 1967 • No. 11
