Take for example, the pending state operating budget, House Bill 33, now in an Ohio House committee. As introduced, the budget was 4,311 pages long. Then, last week a rewritten (or “substitute”) bill surfaced, and — hey, presto — the bill now has 5,364 pages. That is, the measure is 24% longer, and (of course) all those extra words are about good government.
True, no thanks to a state law that closes certain legislative files to taxpayers, reporters will uncover some of the budget’s dicier sections. But after the House substitute comes the House-passed budget. Then come the Senate “substitute” and Senate-passed versions. Icing the cake will be a conference committee budget — the one Gov. Mike DeWine will sign — supposedly written by three senators and three representatives but, in reality, by two GOP leaders, House Speaker Jason Stephens, of Lawrence County’s Kitts Hill, and Senate President Matt Huffman, of Lima.
The effect of these inter-chamber handoffs is to hide how something got into the budget — or got kept out. One root of that problem is having two legislative chambers. The General Assembly, like the legislatures of 48 other states, is composed of a Senate and a second house, called the House of Representatives or the House of Delegates or the Assembly.
Originally, state senates, like the U.S. Senate, were often apportioned by geography, regardless of population, while states’ lower houses were apportioned (officially) population. But as recently noted, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the 1960s both chambers of states’ legislatures should be determined by population.
That means there’s one Ohio House member for every 119,000 Ohioans, and one Ohio Senate member for every 356,000 Ohioans — although rare indeed are the Ohioans who can name (let alone both) their legislators. (But you can be sure Statehouse lobbyists can.)
In theory, having two chambers, both based on population, slows legislation so it can get a thorough look-see — two pairs of eyes looking out for a given swathe of Ohio are better than one pair of eyes, supposedly. In fact, what a bicameral legislature can do better is hide who did what to whom, and why. And in the worst cases, two-chamber legislatures amount to tollgates for legislation: Someone donates to somebody, or traffic doesn’t move. But trying to deternine who did what for whom is like trying to navigate a maze.
Only one state, Nebraska, has opted for a one-chamber (unicameral) legislature, but Ohio civic groups and reformers in the 1930s and 1940s gave serious thought to, and sometimes called for, a unicameral Ohio General Assembly. The idea didn’t go anywhere, because new ideas generally don’t in Ohio unless the occasional millionaire has a brainstorm — and Statehouse pals.
True, maybe it’s better for Ohioans to have one House member and state senator look out for them at the Statehouse. But is that what’s actually happening? After all, 51 (of 99) Ohio House members and 19 (of 33) state senators voted to bail out FirstEnergy Corp. Would those legislators have voted to bail you out?
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