State Legislatures Magazine: July/August 1999

Editor's Note: This article appeared in the July/August 1999 issue of NCSL's magazine, State Legislatures. To order copies or to subscribe, contact the marketing department at (303) 364-7700.

Enter the New Breed

The New Outsiders
Making Changes Fast
Shaking Up the Legislature
Challenging Conventional Wisdom
Making Yourself Heard
Coming Changes

Enter the New Breed

Every legislature has always had them. Newcomers with special agendas, who buck the process, irritate the leadership and stir up the members. But technology, term limits and a shrinking world may be giving rise to a different kind of "newcomer"-and more of them.

By Garry Boulard

There was a time when new members came to the legislature, were assigned seats in the back row and made to understand that for a couple of years they should keep quiet and watch.

But times have changed. Term limits in 18 states, growing Republican numbers in the South, complicated issues brought about by international agreements and the wonders of the information age have given rise to a different kind of "newcomer" in the legislature.

Kathleen A. Stevens is a perfect example.

Elected to the Maine House of Representatives when she was only 22 years old, she's never made much more than $15,000 a year, recently received a master's in English and American literature (fellow lawmaker Tom Davidson jokes that Stevens never reads anything unless is it more than 100 years old) and is perfectly comfortable challenging the powers that be and the way things traditionally have been done.

And because of Maine's term limits, Stevens, who is now 27 and the ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee, is at the end of her career in the House.

She is what might be described as a "new breed" of legislator: unconnected to any party machinery, untraditional and uncommonly candid for an elected official.

Right now Stevens is being particularly candid about term limits in Maine, a law that ironically has helped propel her to greater positions of power simply because the senior members before her were forced to abandon ship.

"Term limits are an imposition on democracy," Stevens says simply. But what really riles her is the loss of institutional memory.

And this is not a new complaint, even among the new breed.

According to futurist Ed Barlow, a strategic planning consultant who is on the graduate school faculty at the University of San Francisco, state legislatures across the land are increasingly caught up in a subtle interplay between the new kind of lawmaker and the term limits trend, which has both spurred and then suddenly halted their public careers.

"The biggest complaint against term limits, even on the part of new legislators, is that history walks out the door when term-limited members have to leave," Barlow says. "These are the people who know where the bones are buried, how government works, why things have been done the way they are."

For Stevens, term limits mean she had to recently fight to get a measure she sponsored-it would make animal abuse a felony-sent to the right committee. Even though the clerk of the House and the secretary of the Senate recommended the measure be sent to the criminal justice committee, the bill analysis pegged it for the House's agriculture committee. In Maine, the full House and Senate make the final assignment of a bill. For Stevens it was a battle to convince the House's many new members that the analysis was wrong.

"Where a bill ends up can have a huge impact on its final outcome," says Stevens. She fought for the better part of a week to get the bill sent back to the criminal justice committee, where eventually it was unanimously passed.

Had term limits not already taken from the House some of its most senior and wisest members, Stevens says, such mistakes would be less likely to occur.

THE NEW OUTSIDERS
As a group, the new breed could be called outsiders. More young than old, more inexperienced than experienced, and, in the states with term limits, destined to stay in their jobs for only a fleeting period of time, they are a different and sometimes unpredictable and uncontrollable force in the nation's legislatures.

And they want to get things done in a hurry. In Michigan such a lawmaker is Mark Jansen, elected to the House only three years ago when he was 36 years old. Jansen is typical of the new breed in that challenging the ancients doesn't bother him a whit. He has already tried once for the speakership and candidly promises to do so again at the beginning of the next legislative session.

"Term limits are good because they give a person like me a chance to take on a real position of leadership," says Jansen, who will witness more than half of the current Michigan Legislature fall to term limits in the next six years.

"There are going to be more and more people here who are less interested in saying that we have to do things a certain way just because that's the way it has always been," continues Jansen. "Instead you are going to see a new generation of people just simply looking for a better way. And that's good for the system, too."

MAKING CHANGES FAST
In Oregon, the new member is exemplified by William E. Morrisette, mayor of Springfield for 10 years before coming to the legislature. Representative Morrisette, who also served stints on the city council and the county council of governments is happily taking on some of the House's most sacrosanct practices, largely because he knows that with term limits he won't have much time to shake up the status quo.

One of Morrisette's principal complaints is the closed party caucus system in the Oregon House, which he calls "dictatorial and undemocratic, an abomination that does not even come close to serving our citizens well."

Morrissette is determined to break down the system, although he admits, "I am getting nowhere with this idea this session." And he says term limits have only made him more driven in his goals: "I have to be directed on this because I only have a small amount of time to get what I want accomplished."

SHAKING UP THE LEGISLATURE

Republicans and Democrats, men and women, white, Hispanic and African American, the new breed comes from a variety of different perspectives and backgrounds, and they like nothing more than to shake up their respective legislatures with new notions of what's important and how to get things done.

In Texas, Senator Eliot Shapleigh, elected in l996, has a giant agenda before him because of decisions made far from the halls of Texas government. He wants his fellow lawmakers to wise up and see the profound cultural, economic and political changes that NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement) brings to the Texas/Mexican border, part of which encompasses his El Paso district.

"In issues of work force, infrastructure and health care, the Texas border is now a very strategic, significant spot for both Texas and the rest of the country," Shapleigh says. He predicts that it will take "at least three or four sessions" to address all of the issues coming out of the border culture, so it's a good thing Texas doesn't have term limits. "What's going on at the border represents a profound change in our overall society that is not easily understood. But slowly the message is moving through the political process, and Texas is responding."

In the Maine House, Tom Davidson and Kathleen Stevens make up part of what journalists call the "Kid's Caucus" due to the age of its 20-something members. Davidson is worried about people who are even younger-teenagers-and whether or not state legislatures truly understand their particular needs.

Only 22 when he was elected to the Maine House in 1994, Davidson flies into the Capitol parking lot every morning with the sounds of rap and hip-hop blaring from his car windows.

"I try to stay in touch as much as possible with the things that matter to young people," he explains. "The other day we had a bill that would have prevented the police from using adolescents in sting operations where they try to snare people buying cigarettes and alcohol for them. I found myself asking some of my fellow lawmakers when was the last time they had talked to anyone who is a teenager, or a group of teenagers for that matter, for more than 10 minutes."

Davidson talks to them all the time. He regularly visits regional high schools and has helped create a nonprofit organization that funds grants for teen programs.

"I want young people to get excited about politics, and I want them to stay in our state as long as possible," Davidson adds. "We have to do everything we can in the environment of the state Legislature to make that happen."

CHALLENGING CONVENTIONAL WISDOM
Scott Beason, who is 29 and won a seat last year in the Alabama House, got to where he is by challenging a long-time incumbent whose campaign budget, he says, "was at least four times as large as mine."

Because Beason arrived where he is today by challenging both the conventional wisdom and his entrenched elders, he has little patience for tradition in the House. Concepts of what is a conservative and what is a liberal tire him. But he is part of growing Republican numbers in his state and much of the South. Those increasing GOP members are changing the climate in legislatures where leadership could once ignore them.

Beason is also typical of the new breed in that he is entirely unafraid to state his true feelings on any number of topics, the most important of which is his Christianity. "The strongest influence in my life is Jesus Christ," Beason says. "I know it is in vogue in some circles to invoke God's name. But in my case, it is just how I feel. And my belief offers me the ability to stand by moral decisions and matters of right and wrong."

Beason believes Southern lawmakers of his generation have overcome racism. "People my age just want to do the right thing in terms of all of the people, without regard to race. Some people can't stop talking about race. I want to move beyond it."

The young representative frequently fights against not only the kind of legislation passed in the Alabama House (he is ardently opposed to gambling in every form), but the way bills are passed.

"The leadership around here is focused on being swift, on getting more things passed than ever before," Beason says. "For the first time, we have a time-limited calendar, and I just think things are moving too quickly. I, for one, would like to have more time on legislation, to make sure that it is both a good idea and properly written."

Similarly in Missouri, first-term House member Catherine L. Hanaway says she doesn't like the way her colleagues pass money bills: "I've been surprised by how overwhelmingly all of our appropriations bills have passed. There is a small group of us who have voted no every time. We don't only disagree with the bills, but with the process, too.

"I keep thinking about how irrelevant so much of this is," Hanaway says, "all of these battles and the competition within the chamber between different parties. It all seems so darn important to the members who serve here, but it doesn't mean a thing to the people back home."

MAKING YOURSELF HEARD
There was a time when newly elected freshmen just stayed quiet, fearful of giving offense, eager to please the dictates of their elders.

But that's not how Hanaway sees her job.

"I just think you have to stand up and make yourself heard," she says. "Just because I am new here does not mean I have to timidly accept everything that comes with the House. We got the budget books for us to look over on the very same day that we were supposed to question people from the major state departments. To me, that is just speeding the process up a little too much."

Futurist Barlow says that such independence of spirit is not only a principal characteristic of the new breed, it is also a mirror reflection of all of the rest of us.

"There is a large movement going on in this country toward individuals and self-realization," Barlow thinks. "People want things their way, and they want their own interests met."

In state legislatures, the new breed is going to make it harder for legislative leaders to achieve consensus.

"It is going to be much harder to get agreements on anything because increasingly the newer members are going to be going off in a dozen different directions, trying to get their agendas completed quickly because of term limits," Barlow continues.

That the newer members are more likely to go find their own sources of information and background for bill research also weakens the leadership. "I can get on line and talk to someone in China in a couple of minutes," says Davidson in Maine. "The Internet has brought everyone in the world much closer together and given new, mostly younger, legislators a powerful tool for making their own connections."

COMING CHANGES
In the next two election cycles, as the nation's legislatures swim into the new millenium, the new breed of legislators will not only become more numerous, but prominent as well.

Already many of them-Stevens of Maine, Jansen of Michigan-have gotten a taste of real power and like it. Others may be confined to the role of the chamber agitator, pushing the consciences of the members for greater reform and access. "My goal is to just break up the ol' boy system, which is still very much in operation," admits Morissette of Oregon.

The one thing that is certain is that the new breed will provide a new force and dynamic whose power and impact can only be imagined.

"They are going to change the statehouses as we know them very substantially," says Barlow. "In many ways nothing will be the same as it was before. Whether this will be good or bad no one today can say."

Garry Boulard, a frequent contributor to State Legislatures, is a free-lance writer from New Orleans.

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