The following article was first published in a 2014 print edition of State Legislatures magazine as part of a series commemorating NCSL's 40th anniversary.
With apologies to Charles Dickens, the 1990s were the best of times and the worst of times for state legislatures. They were the best because amazing new technologies improved how we communicate and manage information. A booming economy lifted everyone's boat. A brave optimism about "reinventing government" prevailed. Profound changes in welfare policy enjoyed bipartisan support. And sea changes in politics increased party competition across the nation.
Why the worst? Legislatures were "under siege." A distrustful public imposed term limits on lawmakers in 21 states. Citizens were routinely bypassing the legislative process with voter initiatives. The U.S. Supreme Court limited states ability to tax sales outside their bound-aries. Federalism developed a difficult-to-deal-with dual personality. And lawmakers in a half dozen states were caught in corruption scandals.
Technology Touches All
Technological changes swept through American life in the 1990s, profoundly affecting state legislatures along the way. Stories from State Legislatures magazine illustrate the evolution.
A 1991 article touted the Michigan Senate as the first in the nation to have computers on members' desks that allowed them to vote using a touch screen, perform word processing, create spreadsheets and file documents—all on bulky black-and-white monitors. Yet, the article made no mention of e-mail or the World Wide Web.
Three years later, the magazine answered "What is the Internet?" by explaining the intricacies of gopher servers, Telnet, Usenet (remember those?) and electronic mail. In 1995 the magazine reported that 41 states offered bill information through the Internet. Then, in 1996, a cover story cutely titled, "coNEcTed: Welcome to the Web," opened the floodgates, and stories on the Web (" wonderland there inside your computer") followed regularly, informing readers on everything from state taxes on Internet services to sex on the 'Net.
Pressure Cooker Still Hissed
Despite these internal improvements in the legislative process, legislatures were under extreme pressure from the outside. Voter initiatives in the late 1970s and early 1980s had started a lasting trend of restricting the power and authority of legislatures through tax and spending limits. This byproduct of public distrust in all-things government expanded dramatically in 1990 when voters in California, Colorado and Oklahoma imposed the first term limits on state legislators.
Ironically, even though Congress was arguably the target of the initiatives, after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that states could not impose term limits on members of Congress, state legislatures were the ones left handcuffed by a lack of experience and institutional knowledge.
By 2000, 21 other states had enacted term limits, although four were invalidated by state supreme courts and two were later repealed. That left the final count at 15. NCSL's national study on the effects of term limits found governors gained power in relation to legislatures in term-limited states.
A few lawmakers didn't help the cause either. In 1991, corruption scandals erupted in Arizona, California, South Carolina, Tennessee and West Virginia, leading NCSL Executive Director Bill Pound to editorialize, "The legislature as an institution has always been stronger than an individual's wrong-doing, and it can emerge strengthened if leaders act forcefully and effectively when dealing with instances of corruption.”
All this cast shadows on our system of resentative democracy, and was summed up by the magazine's January '94 cover story: "Legislatures Under Siege."
Public Policy Favorites
The signature public policy issue of the 1990s was welfare reform. Between 1992 and 1995, 29 states enacted significant reforms that led a Republican Congress and Democratic president in 1996 to agree to devolve authority for welfare policy to the states. Although Temporary Assistance for Needy Families created several options for states, many were not well-understood. NCSL's Jack Tweedie and Sheri Steisel traveled the country tirelessly to provide advice and assistance to legislatures on welfare reform.
A few other policy issues began to emerge during this decade as well. Legalized gambling was spreading rapidly as states sought new sources of revenue. A savings and loan crisis forced states and the federal government to revise their banking regulations. And while the nation celebrated the completion of 99 percent of the interstate highway system, Oklahoma became the first state to use an automated highway toll collection system.
The tragic bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building in April 1995 stirred new concerns about the security of government buildings and public life and the vulnerability of America to random acts of terrorism. With an uneasy public, governments at all levels began using security procedures that would not come to full fruition until after 9/11.
The buzzwords in legislatures at the time were "reinventing government" after the eponymous book by David Osborne and Ted Gaebler. States established reinventing government commissions to address the challenges of what the authors called the "post-industrial, knowledge-based, global economy." Texas' comprehensive performance audit of all of state government became the model for the Clinton Administration's National Performance Review led by Vice President Al Gore.
Federalism Times Two
Federalism in the 1990s was like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, NCSL's then-Deputy Executive Director Carl Tubbesing reported in a magazine article near the end of the decade. Dr. Jekyll represented the positive devolution of federal authority to the states in the form of welfare reform, a new safe drinking water act, the children's health program, changes to Medicaid and protections for the states through the Unfunded Mandate Relief Act. Mr. Hyde, on the other hand, limited state authority and flexibility, preempted state laws, greatly increased the number of federal crimes and snatched regulation of banking away from states. These two personalities of federal policy were at war with each other.
In response, Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt proposed a Conference of the States for governors and legislators to discuss how to redress this growing imbalance of power. Opponents on both the right and the left organized to prevent what they feared would turn into a constitutional convention. So plans were scaled back, and in 1995, NCSL, the National Governors Association, the Council of State Governments and the American Legislative Exchange Council convened a "States Federalism Summit" instead and agreed to a set of "federalism statutory principles and proposals."
A 1992 Supreme Court decision also had a profound impact on state and local governments' federal policy agendas. In Quill Corp.v. North Dakota, the Supreme Court ruled that retailers should not be required to collect state sales taxes on out-of-state transactions if they don't have a physical presence (a store or building) in that state. The decision seemed insignificant in that pre-Amazon.com era. But as online commerce grew, its ramifications for lost state revenue became clear.
For more than 20 years, NCSL has led a coalition of state and local government organi-zations, Main Street retailers and a few willing online sellers in urging Congress to enact legislation that would authorize the collection of interstate sales taxes.
A few years after the Quill case, another decision had the opposite effect on state budgets. In 1998, the four largest tobacco companies in the United States settled Medicaid lawsuits filed against them by 46 state attorneys general, resulting in a windfall for state revenue. Many states securitized the proceeds from the settlement by selling tobacco bonds.
A Parity in Politics
Although the outsized personality of the 42nd president, William Jefferson Clinton, dominated the politics of the 1990s, Republicans won control of Congress in 1994 and made enormous gains in state legislatures as well, engineered in part by Newt Gingrich's "Contract With America."
Republicans were especially successful in the South. They won control of the Florida and South Carolina senates and the North Carolina and South Carolina houses of representatives for the first time since the 1870s. And, in 1996, Florida became the first southern state to have Republicans in control of both chambers.
In the January 1995 issue of the magazine, Vanderbilt University political scientist Dewey Grantham described the political landscape like this: "My hope has always been that we would eventually have a genuine two-party competition in [the South]. But with this election, there are strong signs that we are just going to swap one solid South for another, that what was once all-Democratic is now ... about to become all-Republican."
He could not have been more correct. It took nearly 20 years, but the legislatures of the once solid Democratic South are now completely under Republican control.
As the 1990s ended and Americans marched into a decade no one knew what to call, the focus turned to the calendar and what horrific disasters might occur due to Y2K. Not any, as it turned out. If only that could have held true the entire decade.