| New York's State Legislature is the most dysfunctional in the nation. This is not hyperbole. This is fact.
 In an exhaustive 56 page study, The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University's School of Law illustrated in depressing detail how truly F-ed up our State's Senate and Assembly have become.
The entire study can be read here. (warning: pdf).
The short version - individual rank and file legislators have no power. Senate and Assembly committees have no power and serve no purpose. Everything, and I mean everything, is decided unilaterally by the State Senate leader, Joseph Bruno, and the State Assembly leader, Sheldon Silver. And it's all done secretly. Simply put, the old Soviet Union's Politburo was more of a Democratic institution than the New York State Legislature.
For a few more details, here are some of the report's findings: |
Dysfunctional Legislative Committees
In most modern legislatures, committees "are the locus of most legislative activity." Committees have two principal functions: first, to enable legislators to develop, examine, solicit public and expert feedback upon, and improve bills in a specific area of expertise and to convey the results of their work to the full chamber; and second, to oversee certain administrative agencies to ensure that they fulfill their statutory mandates. New York's committee system generally does not serve either of those functions.
Barriers to Consideration of Legislation by the Full Senate or Assembly
Even when a bill has the support of a majority of legislators within a chamber, the New York's Legislature makes it more difficult than any other legislature in the country to discharge a bill from a committee for the full chamber to consider. In addition, New York allows the Majority Leader and Speaker complete control over the legislative calendars to determine whether and when a bill that has been reported out of a committee will be considered by the full Senate or Assembly, respectively.
No Debates, No Amendments, Inadequate Review
In most legislatures, the procedural rules and practices encourage and even require legislators to read, consider, debate and amend bills before voting on them in person. By contrast, New York's Legislature discourages and even precludes such deliberative activities by legislators
Few Conference Committees
Conference committees are widely used in the U.S. Congress and in other state legislatures to reconcile differences between the bills passed by the two houses of a legislature to produce a single law that can be passed by both. In New York, however, conference committees have been used only rarely since the first decades of the 20th Century. Instead, to pass a bill into law one chamber move to substitute the other chamber's version of the bill for its own, with the leaders of the two chambers working out any differences directly.
As a result, New York does not have any established mechanism to prevent legislative gridlock if the Speaker and Majority Leader cannot resolve their differences directly in a closed-door session. The result, in too many cases, is a failure to pass even legislation that has garnered overwhelming support among legislators and the public. In addition, New York does not obtain the benefits of a conference committee's review and airing for public scrutiny of the final version of a bill before it is voted into law
Every citizen of the State of New York should be embarrassed that our State Legislature is such an anti-Democratic joke. We should be chomping at the bit to demand change. And some of us are. But not nearly enough of us. And, unfortunately, the current leaders, State Senate leader Joe Bruno and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, seem to think everything is fine. Here's Bruno from just a couple weeks ago:
[Republican Senate Leader Joseph] Bruno pointed out to local educators, business leaders and philanthropists that he's a key player in New York's annual budget process and the sole Capital Region member of the "three men in a room" who control state spending. The other two are Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, a Manhattan Democrat, and Gov. George Pataki.
While this troika has frequently been criticized in the media and by government watchdogs as an unhealthy concentration of power, Bruno said it's worked well for the Albany area.
"Think that's a coincidence?" he asked, after recounting the region's successes. "That happened because as majority leader I sit at a table and for the press people who don't like it, three men in a room works pretty well."
It's time to take these jokers down. With a wrecking ball. We need to elect reform-minded Senators and Assembly-members who will insist on the rule changes necessary to make New York a Democratic State again. We need to make November 4, 2008 the date that New Yorkers cut off the oxygen to the three men in a room for good.
By the way, I have a favor to ask. Could any of the techies reading this convert the Brennan study to a searchable HTML format? I think it would be useful for New York based bloggers to have a document that they could easily search on and cite for future use. Thanks. |
