PLS 103 Lecture 3 1. Today we talk about the Missouri legislature. What we re doing in this section we

Transcription

1 PLS 103 Lecture 3 1 Today we talk about the Missouri legislature. What we re doing in this section we finished the Constitution and now we re gonna talk about the three main branches of government today, the legislature, next time the executive, and then finally the judiciary. We have a constitutional framework from the last class. Today we want to talk about the Missouri legislature which is called the General Assembly. What s the first thing that we think about when we think about the Missouri General Assembly? What s the first word you use to describe the Missouri General Assembly? Just like the United States Congress, the Missouri General Assembly is bicameral. The first thing you think about. What does bicameral mean? Two houses. The Missouri legislature is bicameral meaning it has two houses. Does every legislature have two houses? You re shaking your head but the camera can t hear you shaking you head. Nebraska has a unicameral house. And in the history of the United States, other states have had unicameral, but Nebraska is the only one that currently has unicameral. So Missouri legislature the first thing we have to talk about is the fact that it s bicameral which is an example of separation of powers, checks and balances, that we talked about last time. The House can t do anything on its own. The Senate can t do anything on its own. They have on check on each other. So what we want to talk about today is the House and the Senate and how they compare. And we ll talk about the basic things: how old do you have to be, what the terms are, and some of the more elaborate things differentiating the House and the Senate. How old do you have to be to be in the House? See, pages 16 to 20. I know that was a lot of reading from the last class. You have to be 24 years old. In the Senate you have to be 30. What s the logic?

2 PLS 103 Lecture 3 2 You re more mature, you have more at stake, and this is common in most statehouses as it is in the United States House. There is an example there s one case of an individual challenging the age requirement, arguing it was age discrimination. The person running for office was not 24 and was barred by the Constitution from running. So they did what any red-blooded American would do. They sued. And the case was this: the person who wanted to run for office argued that if you calculated his age based on his date of conception, then he would be 24. The court threw it out. The court threw that one out. All right. Second thing would be the term. Very basic stuff here. What s the term of a member of the House in Missouri? Two years. I have to work on the reading requirements here. They re obviously too heavy. What s the term requirement for the Senate excuse me the term for the Senate? Always a trick question on the exam. What s the term for a Missouri senator? Not six. That s U.S. Four. Four-year terms. Now, there s an important difference with respect to the terms. All House members all house members are elected every two years. Every single one. The Senate, the terms are staggered. Senate terms are staggered. They elect half the House excuse me. I said it wrong. Half the Senate and then they elect the other half, and they do it by even and odd districts. The odd districts are all up this time and the even districts are up next time. So you ll always have a half a Senate that was there before. The reason we do this is to provide for, in the Senate side, what s called institutional memory. If you elect the entire Senate all at the same time, it is possible, although not likely, that the entire Senate would be replaced. And so the Senator would say, Well, how do we do

3 PLS 103 Lecture 3 3 this? No one would know the answer. So having staggered Senate terms provides some continuity to State government, provides em institutional memory. Well, if that s true, why do we elect all House members? That s because the House in Missouri is your branch. If you don t like your legislature if you don t like your legislator, then it is your right as a citizen to get rid of them. Because they are the one that represents you most directly, which is what we re gonna talk about next. Let s talk about numbers. How many people in the Missouri House? How many people in the Senate? One hundred and sixty-three House members and 34 senators. One hundred and sixty-three House members, 34 senators. Many things we need to talk about in this regard. One is the Missouri House is larger than most state houses. One hundred and sixty-three members in Missouri s House makes it larger than most statehouses. Thirty-four senators makes it somewhat smaller than most state senates. Thirty-four senators make it smaller. Now, you have to think about what this means in terms of the State of Missouri. And that s a really awful drawing of the State of Missouri. Get used to it. The bigger the House you have to put on your thinking caps the bigger the House, the more people in the House, what does that tell you about the districts? Smaller districts. That s very important. So the House itself is larger but the districts in the House are smaller. What does a small district do for you the constituent? Do you know your House member? Not you personally. You have a small district. What s the likelihood? The smaller the district, the more likely it is that you will know you representative. The smaller the district, the more likely it is that the representative just like you. The smaller the district, the more

4 PLS 103 Lecture 3 4 homogeneous the district is. So the person that gets elected from a small district is gonna be like you. The person who s elected from that small district knows you. You can get in touch with them, which we re gonna talk about here in just a second. But the House districts in Missouri are small enough that some House members to this day walk their district a couple of times a year. Now, some of the northern central counties of Missouri, it s a little bit too big. But districts in Missouri, representatives will districts in Springfield excuse me representatives will walk and go door to door and talk to their constituents, passing out literature. It is not uncommon in the urban areas to see your representative because the districts are small. Now, that is not possible in the Senate. Here the districts are larger. Senate districts are larger. Senators then represent a more heterogeneous constituency. Senators are forced to look at not little parochial issues but they tend to look at the larger picture because they represent people in a broader area. There s a third aspect of the size that makes a big difference: diversity. Missouri has one of the larger House, the districts are small. That lends itself to a greater amount of diversity in the House. On the other hand, 34 Senators? Less diverse. Thirty-four senators, you re much less likely to find the diversity. So if you looked at the Missouri House today, you would find more women, more minorities, more religious backgrounds, more educational backgrounds. Diversity in the House is larger than the diversity in the Senate. That by itself is not necessarily good or bad. But what you have to imagine is a more diverse House dealing with public policy issues and also having to deal with a less diverse Senate. And there are certain types of public policy in Missouri where the diversity of the House comes into conflict

5 PLS 103 Lecture 3 5 with the lack of diversity in the Senate. The question is, how often do we come into conflict because of diversity and the answer is probably not as much as you would think. Because Missouri isn t all that diverse as a state to begin with. The divisions don t have to do generally with issues of diversity so much as they have to do with urban versus rural. And those are not the issues of diversity that we re normally talking about. So the size, just the size 163 versus 34 makes a big difference with respect to Missouri public policy in a variety of ways. Okay. Moving from the diversity issue, we also need to talk about leadership. After we erase because I don t have enough room. Leadership in the House, leadership in the Senate. Who s the leader of the House? You can do this on your own, even without reading the material. Who s the leader of the House? What do we call him? No, we don t call him a majority leader. Who do we call the leader in the House? Same as United States Congress. I need to find out who you had for American Government so that I can send them letters. Dear Dr. So-and-So. The leader of the House is the speaker. Speaker of the House. The Speaker of the House is the formal presiding officer in the House in Missouri, is the formal presiding officer. The Speaker presides. What does that mean? That means he bangs the gavel. Beyond that beyond that, the Speaker of the House in Missouri has very extensive authority. The Speaker is always -- going back to your answer a minute ago, the Speaker is always the majority leader. The party that has the majority in the House elects a leader. If you have the majority in the House and there s a vote for Speaker, your majority leader is going to win. And so when it comes to committee assignments in your party, the Speaker makes

6 PLS 103 Lecture 3 6 them. The Speaker in Missouri has a considerable amount of power. The Missouri House also has what s called a Pro Tem which is short for the Latin abbreviation it s a Latin abbreviation. There is a Pro Tem who bangs the gavel when the Speaker is not there. Now, this is important. Because when we contrast it to the Senate, it s gonna be an interesting difference. The Pro Tem in the House is always a very close ally to the Speaker. So that the President Pro Tem in the House is going to do what the Speaker would do. So in terms of leadership of the House, there are two positions of authority: the Speaker who is the presiding officer, who has extensive authority, and then when the Speaker is not present, there is Pro Tem who is always a close ally, always a member of the same party. Go to the Senate side and we have a slightly different thing. According to the Constitution, who is the presiding officer of the Missouri Senate? Not the President Pro Tem. According to the Constitution, the presiding officer is the Lieutenant Governor. According to the Constitution, the presiding officer is the Lieutenant Governor. This presents an interesting dilemma. That s what it says in the Constitution but that s not what really happens. In the United States Constitution there are things that are there that aren t the way it really is, and this is a good example for Missouri. The Lieutenant Governor, according to the Constitution, is the presiding officer. According to the Constitution, that s true but he s not really. The real presiding officer is the Pro Tem. The real presiding officer is the Pro Tem. The Pro Tem is the majority leader so the head of the majority party is going to be elected the Pro Tem. The only power that the presiding officer has when he s the Lieutenant Governor is to vote in a tie. The only real power the Lieutenant Government has is to vote in a tie. Can the

7 PLS 103 Lecture 3 7 Lieutenant Governor preside over the Senate? The answer is yes. If the Lieutenant Governor wanted to, he has the Constitutional authority to bang the gavel every single day in the Senate. And if he chose to, he could have an impact on legislation. History tells us that that does not happen. The Lieutenant Governor does not preside in the Senate. And there s a reason for that. It s related to the Executive lecture we ll do next time. But there s something different about the Lieutenant Governor as opposed to the Speaker of the House. What do we know about the Lieutenant Governor in Missouri? Generally nothing, because that s why you re here in this class, learning Missouri government. The Governor and Lieutenant Governor are elected separately. You could have a Democratic Governor and a Republican Lieutenant Governor. More importantly, you could have a Republican Lieutenant Governor and a Democratically controlled Senate. Or the other way around, a Democratic Lieutenant Governor and a Republican controlled Senate. If the Executive Branch exerts that kind of influence in Missouri s legislature, then we have problems. So historically, because the Lieutenant Governor isn t always from the majority party, Lieutenant Governors have stayed out of Senate politics. That is not true for the Speaker. The Speaker is elected by the members of the majority party and is always a member of the majority party. Because that s not always the case for the Lieutenant Governor, history tells us that the Constitution is wrong. The President Pro Tem who is the majority leader is the real power in the Senate. So it s an important difference. It s somewhat like the United States where the Vice-President of the United States is the presiding officer in the Senate but

8 PLS 103 Lecture 3 8 doesn t exercise that power. So in terms of the Lieutenant Governor, the most important power they have is voting in a tie. There s another aspect that we have to talk about with respect to the House and Senate, and that has to do with term limits. Let s talk about term limits. And we re gonna move across to the other side of the board for a little bit as well, because when Missouri adopted term limits they did it in a very interesting way. And it s information that s in your book but it s not entirely up-to-date, so we need to update a little bit of what s in the text. In 1992 in 1992, the voters of Missouri passed a term limit amendment to the Constitution. Article 3, Section 8. I ll put it over here for now. Article 3, Section 8. Article 3, Section 8 has essentially two parts. Part one has to do with Missouri and Missouri term limits in the Missouri General Assembly, in the House and in the Senate. And the term limits are for the House. You can serve eight years. How many terms, then? Four terms. In the Senate the maximum number of years you can serve is also eight. So in the Senate you can serve two terms. And then the term limit said a max of 16. So you could run for the House, serve eight years, and then run for the Senate and serve eight years, or the other way around. But the max total you could serve was 16. Now, we re gonna spend some time at the end of the semester on what is the impact of term limits on Missouri. But this amendment took effect this past fall was the first time people were term limited out based on the 1992 amendment. Now, why do we impose term limits on members of the House and members of the Senate? The argument is to guarantee that they do not lose touch with their constituents. The longer they re in the capital, the longer they re in Jeff City, the more important their own personal power is rather than

9 PLS 103 Lecture 3 9 working for the constituents. Again, we re gonna spend more time on that a little bit later in the semester. It s important here just to talk about the term limits themselves. House members can serve no more than eight years, Senators can serve no more than eight years, and there s a max total of 16 years. So that s the Missouri aspect of the amendments in Article 3, Section 8. This is the part that needs an update from the book. Missouri also adopted term limits for United States Representatives, for United States Senators. In the same Constitutional Amendment vote in 1992, the citizens of Missouri also voted for term limits at the United States level. This causes a different sort of problem. This was challenged immediately in other states where the same type of term limits had been imposed. And as the result of an Arkansas term limits challenge, the United States Supreme Court ruled that Missouri voters in the Missouri Constitution could not impose term limits on federal legislators. What happened in 1992 is you voted to limit the terms of your House members and your Senators in Missouri. The court said fine, you can do that. But you also voted to limit the terms of office of federal officials in the United States House and the United States Senate. And the United States Supreme Court said that you don t have the power to do. In order to do that, you d have to amend the U.S. Constitution. The Missouri Constitution doesn t hold water in that regard and in the textbook it only discusses the fact that this was passed. But since that text was written, the court has ruled that the U.S. aspects of term limits are unconstitutional. Do you want to ask about that? Talk about term limits? Okay. So in terms of the bicameral nature of the House and the Senate, those are the highlights. Those are the most important things.

10 PLS 103 Lecture 3 10 The next thing that we have to talk about in terms of the Missouri legislature is the sessions, how Missouri s legislature is organized. There are three types of legislative sessions in Missouri, three types of legislative sessions in Missouri. The first is what we refer to generally as regular sessions. Now, there is a mandatory time limit in the Constitution for a regular session of the Missouri legislature. What is it? How long can people meet? It s six and a half months. Six and a half months. The Constitution limits regular sessions of the legislature to six and a half months. Now, that s what it says in the Constitution. The average for Missouri legislature is four and a half months. The Constitution establishes a max. They can meet for no longer than six and a half months, but the average or the norm is four and a half months. So the Missouri legislature meets January, February, March, April, and then into May for about half a month. It runs about the same time as a semester runs here at the University. This is very important so I want you to think about this for just a second. You have to do the math. The legislative calendar is divided into two sessions. You serve for two years in the House. A legislative session for the entire General Assembly is defined by that two-year time period. Within the first year you can serve six and a half months but it is more common to only serve four and a half months. That s the first session. You have one session starting in January going for four and a half months. And then through half of May through December you don t meet. And then the second session begins the following January and you meet again for four and a half months. So total number of months in session in a two-year term? Nine. Now, that means your elected representatives in both the House and the Senate serve nine months out of out of 24 months, out of two years. This is what we call this is why we

11 PLS 103 Lecture 3 11 refer to Missouri as a part-time legislature. Missouri is a part-time legislature. Let s talk about what that means. Move over here. We break this down a couple of different ways. Part-time obviously means part-time. You mean 9 out of 24 months. That means you only work part-time in this job. We re gonna spend a lot of time a little bit later about why and what that means, but what do you think it means? What opportunities does this give you, the constituent? It means well, it s two different things. We ll get to that in a second. That s number three. They have to go back to the constituency. So you re in Jefferson City for 9 out of 24 months. That means you are home for how much? Thirteen. Thirteen months at home. That means you are in your constituency. You are in your home town. You are in your home county. You are in your home area. So that anything you did from January through May is now open for discussion with your constituents. You don t like the bill that was passed and how your representative voted? You have the rest of the year to explain it to him. You don t like the way this was done and you have a suggestion? They are there. So the access the access to your representative is much increased because they only serve part-time. Now, go back a little bit just a second. Add to that in the House a small district. You re much more likely to come in personal contact with your representative in Missouri. Small district plus part-time means you have a greater say in policy in Missouri. The third thing, if you re only in the legislature part-time, then you probably have a real job someplace else. This is not to say that representatives don t work when they re there, but you cannot make a living as a member of the House in Missouri. You cannot make a living as a member of the Senate in Missouri. So you go back in those 13 months and you work the

12 PLS 103 Lecture 3 12 family farm. You go back during those 13 months and run the family business. That means you are a regular person in many ways. You work just like your constituents. You re a farmer. You meet your constituents in the feed store. You own a hardware store. Your constituents are your customers. You are more like your constituents in Missouri because you have to have a regular job in your constituency during the off when you re not in legislative session. So the part-time legislature part-time legislature for Missouri is a good thing. It keeps your representatives closer. Now, there s a fourth aspect of a part-time legislature that many people talk about. They can do less damage when they re not there. The longer they re there, the farther away they are from their constituents. And so by keeping them close we get back to that thing we talked about on the very first day. What kind of state is Missouri? Missouri is a conservative state. Do conservatives believe in no change? No, they believe in slow change, gradual change, incremental change. And the part-time nature of the Missouri legislature fits along with that very nicely. So regular sessions of the Missouri legislature: Constitution, six and a half months, but the norm is about four and a half months. All right. That s the first type. Regular sessions. We also have special sessions of the Missouri legislature. Special sessions of Missouri legislature are outside of the regular session. They are outside of that Constitutional six and a half months or the regular four and a half months, and they are called by the Governor. As we ll talk about next time, the Missouri Governor has some legislative powers and this is one. The Governor has the power to call the legislature into session. Generally we call the legislature into session to deal with a pressing issue. The most

13 PLS 103 Lecture 3 13 common example of calling the legislature into special session was in 1993 to deal with massive flooding. Statewide. It was certainly the worst where the Mississippi and the Missouri come together, an area around St. Charles. Devastating floods in Cape Girardeau. We vacated Cape Girardeau, called in the National Guard, sandbagged the river. The Governor called the legislature into special session to deal with the financial implications of the flood, how are we gonna pay for these kinds of things, and also they dealt with issues such as insurance. How do you get the flood insurance, and so on. So the Governor called a special session in the legislature to deal with the issues from this dramatic statewide catastrophe. And there was significant flooding all across the state due to the rains and snows melting upriver and so on. So the Governor called a special session and the legislature met, dealt with that issue, and then disbanded. It s not an excuse to do other things. It s called for a particular purpose, they deal with that particular purpose and they re done. There s a third type of session that is not as common but it lets us talk about something else. Missouri s legislature also has veto sessions. Veto sessions. Veto sessions are always in September. Veto sessions are always in September and I ll bet you you can tell me what s considered during a veto session. Any bill the Governor has vetoed can be reconsidered in a veto session. What we re talking about is the Governor vetoes a bill. The Governor vetoes a bill. The legislature gets together in September to override that veto. The legislature meets to override the veto. A couple of things. One, it takes an extraordinary majority to override the veto so they don t always call special sessions because they may not have the vote to

14 PLS 103 Lecture 3 14 override the veto. And even if they have an override session, that doesn t mean they will actually override the Governor s veto. This is increasingly more complicated in Missouri because of another concept. The veto sessions in Missouri I m gonna slide over here this goes under Missouri excuse me under veto session. I need to learn how to spell. I ll erase over here. Divided government. You need to write that down. It s a very important concept in American politics. Divided government means one party controls the Executive branch and another party controls the Legislative branch. And in the legislature it could be a mix. Democrats control one, Republicans control the other, and the Governor is a member of one or the other parties. In Missouri, the history has been a Governor of one party and a legislature of another party. Today we have a Democratic Governor and a Republican House and a Republican Senate. Over the last decade it s been the reverse. We have a Democratically controlled House, a Democratically controlled Senate, and Republican Governors. And there s only been one exception over the last one, two, three, four, five Governors. Missouri is always faced with divided government and that makes this veto more important. A Democratic legislature passes a bill, a Republican Governor vetoes it. The other way around. The veto sessions have become more important in Missouri as the issues that separate the two parties become more important. Now, after we talk about the executive judiciary, we re gonna talk about Missouri parties and the issues that divide them, what separates Democrats from Republicans in Missouri. And it s probably not as much as you might think. But the veto session is more important in Missouri because Missouri has historically over recent years had divided government, with a governor of one party and a

15 PLS 103 Lecture 3 15 legislature of another. And so the veto sessions become more important. Those are the three kinds of sessions. There s one other aspect that s related to sessions that we need to address and it applies to Missouri more than it does to some other states. And this is an issue that we call deliberation. If we had to do a political science term, we d call it deliberation. What does deliberation mean? Deliberation has, of course, two word roots and they are this one and this one. What s this word? This is deliberate. What is this word? Deliberate. Two different words, two different senses. Deliberate means to do something on purpose, with intention. Deliberate means to discuss, to debate. And it is that sense, it is the deliberate, that we want to talk about here today. There are certain issues with respect to deliberation in the Missouri General Assembly that are worth discussing. One has to do the first one has to do with sessions. We ll go back to sessions for just a second. In the General Assembly there is no carryover. What that means is a bill that s introduced in January gets considered by mid-may or not, and that s it. In the Missouri legislature they don t carry over bills from the first session to the second session. What that means is, you have four and a half months to get your bill introduced and passed. If not, you have to start all over again. This is different than the United States Congress. The United States Congress has a carryover. You can introduce it in the first session and carry that legislation over into the second, so you have the full two years to get it decided. In Missouri there is no carryover of bills from one session to the next and at least one person has argued that this leads to inadequate consideration of legislation. I m not sure if that s true.

16 PLS 103 Lecture 3 16 But if you think about it think about it in this way. The Constitution fixes the amount of time to six and a half months. The norm is four and a half months. Are we doing now more in the legislature than we were 10 years ago or less? What do you think? We re doing more in the legislature. We re doing more in exactly in exactly the same amount of time. So we have X amount of materials to get through in four and a half months and now we have two times X amount of materials to get through in the same amount of time. That suggests that some of that legislation is not getting the type of consideration that it might merit. There is a sense, especially at the end of a session if you go to Jeff City towards the end of the session, there is a flurry of activity to try and get something done on this bill or that bill, or this piece of legislation or that resolution. Because at the middle of the month, the session is over whether we finished this or not. This is especially true with respect to budgets and appropriations. There s certain things that have to get done in this time period and there s some things that might merit consideration but don t get it because of the time constraints. So that s an important issue with respect to the Missouri legislature. Now, each bill each bill that is introduced is guaranteed a committee hearing. Each bill that is introduced in the Missouri legislature is guaranteed a committee hearing. You have a bill about education that you d like to propose. That goes to the appropriate education committee and that committee chairman will schedule a hearing on that bill. This is very important. The next sentence is very important. That is the beginning and the end of most legislation in Missouri. That is the beginning and the end of most legislation in Missouri. Each bill is guaranteed a committee hearing but that s all it s guaranteed. There is nothing that says it will ever come out of committee. What that means is it goes to the committee but

17 PLS 103 Lecture 3 17 never goes to the House. It goes to committee but never goes to the Senate. So for most bills, they ll get introduced and sent to a committee, but never see the light of day with respect to legislation. Because of the four and a half months because of the four and a half months, the Missouri legislature process looks like a funnel. Because it s only four and a half months, very, very few pieces of legislature actually come out at the end of the session. It s a very small number that gets full and complete consideration by the House, by its committees, by the Senate and its committees. The number of laws that come out as opposed to the number of laws that are introduced is very small. The Missouri legislature gives full and formal consideration to a small number of bills every year. With me on that? Okay. Also with respect to deliberation. We have the issue of sessions and no carryover committee hearing. There s also an issue of staff. And we ll talk a little bit more about this a little bit later in the semester. What kind of legislature do we have? How do we describe our legislature? It s a part-time legislature. Who s full-time? Staff is full-time. This is very important when it comes to deliberation. The staff is full-time but the staff is not elected by you. The staff in Missouri is appointed by the officeholder. The staff is not elected. Now, how much staff do we have? The staff in Missouri is small. There is not a large bureaucracy of staff members. Each representative has one secretary. Committees have staff. There s a research staff in both the House and the Senate, but the Missouri legislature is not dominated by a big giant bureaucracy of staff. On the other hand, staff in Missouri is very important because the staff in Missouri provides the continuity. When the legislature is

18 PLS 103 Lecture 3 18 not in session, it is the staff that maintains that continuity. Much of the research and discussion and debate that would ordinarily go on between members takes place in the staff offices. And again, the issue there is that the staff is not elected by you. And so the question is whether the deliberation is as full and complete as you would want it to be in the legislature because the legislative process in Missouri I wouldn t say is dominated by staff, but is very much influenced by staff. Let s go and take it one step further. Every spring SMS sends interns to Jefferson City. Now, in many scenarios interns stuff envelopes, staple papers together. But in Jefferson City when the legislature is in session, interns can take on an enormous responsibility. They do real work and contribute to the legislative process, and it goes back to the fact that the Missouri legislature is essentially part-time. Now, there are movements afoot to make changes in the legislature, and we re gonna talk about a lot of those later in the semester. But over time the pay of legislatures has been increased. What does increased pay do for the legislator? What does increased pay do? Do you want to be a legislator? Why not? Cause you want to be an accountant. What can you do as an accountant that you can t do as a legislator? You can actually make money. The argument is that very few people want to be legislators because there s not any money in it. Now, there s great public service. You ll feel good about yourself. But you actually have to give up working the family farm, the family business, in order to be a legislator. That is a financial disincentive for many people to participate in the General Assembly. And so over time in Missouri the pay of legislators has gone up. But let s be honest. The pay of a legislator in Missouri is still not very high. But by gradually increasing the pay

19 PLS 103 Lecture 3 19 the goal is to attract more qualified legislators. And again, we re gonna talk about that a little bit more. The same thing has happened with the staff. We have increased the pay of staff to attract higher quality, better caliber staff in the Missouri legislature. We say Missouri is part-time. Political scientists would say that that makes Missouri a non-professional legislature. A part-time legislature meets only four and a half months, nine months out of two years. That is a part-time legislature, what we call non-professional. Now, you re the citizen of Missouri. What do you call it? It s just what you want. A professional legislature would mean they re in Jefferson City how many months out of twelve? Twelve months out of twelve. Which means they re out of touch with you. It means they re in Jefferson City, concerned about their own careers more than they re concerned about your needs. And so while political scientists might call Missouri a non-professional legislature in a formal technical definition low pay, low staff, doesn t meet very often the citizen of Missouri says that non-professional legislature is just what they want. We don t want professional politicians because professional politicians don t think like the average Missouri citizen. So we think this is a good thing. What do you think? We got one agreement. We got one agreement. Now, the issue is not to dwell, but the issue facing Missouri and the issues facing the rest of the states in the United States, especially since 9/11 and the budget crisis, there has been movement to make Missouri a little bit more professional. The argument is and we ll talk about how this plays out a little bit later in the semester the argument is that we need a few more what do we need in the legislature? What do I need? I need some more professional people. I need a few more I need a few more accountants because wouldn t

20 PLS 103 Lecture 3 20 it help the legislature to have a few more accountants as opposed to, a few more professional people, a little bit higher paid staff. Because the problems that states are being faced with are much more complex than they were 20 years ago. Twenty years ago a non-professional legislature perfectly suited the state. And, for the most part, Missouri is still well served by its legislature. But from now until 10 years from now, the problems facing Missouri and the problems facing other states are perhaps going to require a more professional legislature. Not necessarily an Illinois legislature or a California legislature, but maybe slightly more professional than we have today.