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.
We wrap up our celebration of the magazine's 40th year with a glance back on the decade of the 2000s—the start of a new century and millennium. Although the decade began with a fizzle—the much-ballyhooed, end-of-life-as-we-know-it Y2K issue that turned out to be nothing but a dud—it soon experienced some bangs, some very big bangs.
The 2000 presidential election was so close that it hung by a few chads and had to be resolved by a U.S. Supreme Court decision 36 days later. The disputed election installed George W. Bush as the 43rd president, and the public's reaction to him, both positive and negative, was to color the red and blue politics of the decade. Two years later, in the 2002 election, Republicans gained control of more state legislatures than Democrats for the first time in 50 years. And even though Democrats recovered some during the end of the decade, generally there was greater political parity between the parties than at any time in recent memory. The decade ended with a different kind of presidential bang—the election of the first African American president, Barack Obama.
The 2000 election also brought calls for election reforms. Demands to change the Electoral College system soon sputtered, but debate over how to administer elections, especially whether to focus reforms on making voting easier or guarding against voter fraud, became an enduring subject of state legislation. The Help America Vote Act placed new federal mandates on the states, and in response, NCSL established a committee to focus on elections and developed expertise on election administration that continues today.
But by far, the cataclysmic, tragic events on Sept. 11, 2001, have had the deepest and most lasting effect on American life and politics. They spawned the ensuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a recession early in the decade and contributed to the Great Recession later on.
The terrorists' attacks also generated new topics for lawmakers. The federal government established new agencies and regulations on airline and public safety that required state responses. The REAL ID Act set standards for state issued driver's licenses that states found to be a particularly bitter and costly federal mandate pill to swallow; so much so that more than a decade later, state compliance is still incomplete. States also dusted off and updated emergency plans and adopted policies to combat cyber terrorism.
The states weathered the relatively brief and shallow recession of 2001 following the collapse of the dot-com bubble and the 9/11 attacks in part with the help of the windfall of Tobacco Settlement money. The much longer and deeper Great Recession, however, had severe impacts on state budgets, causing large reductions in revenue and cutbacks in services. The federal American Recovery and Reinvestment Act that seemed "huge, massive, audacious and ambitious" at the time, according to a story in State Legislatures magazine, helped states and the economy for a while, but the state revenue shortages lasted much longer than the federal aid.
State budgets are just now recovering.
Challenging Policy
Changes in technology also generated new concerns. Foremost among these was the growth in tax-free online sales. NCSL spearheaded a national effort to simplify state sales taxes to make them easier for vendors to collect and to encourage Congress to authorize states to collect them. The resulting Streamlined Sales and Use Tax Agreement went into effect in 2005 with 19 states participating. State and local officials hoped Congress would enact the Main Street Fairness Act to level the playing field between online and local sellers soon thereafter. But a decade later we are still waiting, and it continues to be NCSL's top state-federal relations priority.
The perennial state legislative issues of education, health care and welfare experienced new policy twists as well. The federal role in education expanded with the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002, which imposed more mandates on states. The states and feds experimented with numerous solutions to rising health care costs and coverage of the uninsured. Massachusetts waded into the area of universal health care, which ultimately became the model for the federal Affordable Care Act in 2010. Welfare reform, however, stalled out in the states in the 2000s under the pressure of the two recessions and a lack of funds.
There are other issues that popped up during the decade worth noting today. In the 2000s, state legislatures were busy trying to regulate junk faxes (remember those?), defend the traditional definition of marriage, and define what constitutes a public use of land and is therefore subject to eminent domain. During the decade, the pages of the magazine were filled with advice for legislators about the new social media, with "how to blog" advice leading the way. Interestingly, hydraulic fracturing or fracking—as hot an issue as can be today—wasn't even mentioned in a magazine article on "9 Hot Energy Issues" in the 2000s and another energy story laments that North American natural gas production had declined.
NCSL celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2000 at a gala dinner attended by President Bill Clinton. There, the organization launched the Trust for Representative Democracy, to tell the story of what's right with American democracy and to combat the pervasive problem of public cynicism and distrust. Thousands of legislators have participated in the Trust's flagship program, America's Legislators Back to School, which teaches young people what it's like to be a state legislator.
A 2001 issue of State Legislatures magazine on leadership and institutional changes in the Arizona, Colorado, Maine, Missouri, Vermont and Washington legislatures featured 41 notable legislators, who, interestingly, are almost all gone from legislative life today. In the same issue, nine members of Congress were listed as former state legislators. Most of them, on the other hand, are still serving in Congress today. Of course, four of the featured state legislatures had term limits, but the differing time perspective of service in Congress vs. state legislatures was nonetheless striking.
During this decade, term limits were invalidated—either by court decisions or repeals—in six of the 21 states that had enacted them the previous decade, leaving 15 states to deal with this stricture on legislative power. In 2007, a team of political scientists and practitioners, led by NCSL, published a comprehensive assessment of the impact of term limits. The most significant finding was that legislatures under limits were weakened in relation to governors. The study pointed to ways that states could best adapt to this fundamental institutional change and mitigate its negative effects.
A Peek Into the Future
In 2000, an NCSL task force of legislative staff offered four scenarios on how the legislature as an institution might look in 2025. In the first scenario, the legislature is harassed by the frequent use of the initiative process by voters, but nonetheless discovers how to build and maintain its strength. In the second scenario, the circumvented legislature is so ineffectual that it is weakened and overwhelmed by direct democracy initiatives. The third version contains the traditional legislature, a strong institution that maintains the confidence of the public and thus faces relatively few challenges from direct democracy. The final scenario involves a diminished legislature that has lost the public's confidence and is supplanted by a strong executive or other level of government.
Where are we now, 15 years into this 25-year gaze into the future? As usual, the answer varies from state to state, with none of these scenarios playing out exactly as described. For the most part, the use of the initiative process has not increased over the last 15 years nor has it spread
Certainly there are plenty of examples of traditional legislatures that are effective institutions that maintain public confidence (more or less, given the diminished confidence in all institutions of our time). They are able to reach agreements on complex issues and to craft solutions to state problems.
Congress is a clear example of the last scenario, the diminished legislature, so polarized by competing political views that it is unable to pass meaningful legislation. This has resulted in Congress ceding authority to the president and surrendering its power to the states to find innovative policy solutions to serious concerns.
For the most part, state legislatures have not fallen into congressional-style gridlock, and a more pragmatic, problem-solving approach prevails. But there is a danger, unanticipated by the scenario writers of 2000, that unless governors and state legislatures guard against it, the increasing polarization in Congress and the electorate will infect the state legislative process and lead to an even greater loss in public confidence in government at all levels.