the dominant branch of government.
History has proved the fear of legislative
usurpation to be misplaced; today the
need is to strengthen the legislature, not
to weaken it. Further, the best check
on the legislature is clearly focused
public accountability.
Unicameralists also dispute the claim
that bicameralism prevents corruption of
the legislature. In the past, unicamer-
alists point out, simultaneous corruption
of both houses of states legislatures has
actually occurred. Today, protection of
vested interests requires primarily the
blocking of legislation rather than the
passage of new legislation. Bicameral-
ism presents more points at which leg-
islation can be stopped, and with less
fear of popular understanding of what
has happened, than does unicameralism.
In this view, corruption is a more threat-
ening danger under bicameralism.
Finally, unicameralists reject the va-
lidity of the argument that bicameralism
is desirable since it is traditional and
understood by the voters. A traditional
form of government does not mean it is
good. When Lord Bryce wrote the
American Commonwealth after visiting
the United States in the 1880's, he com-
mented that the government of the cities,
then almost all bicameral, was the one
conspicuous failure of the United States.
The dramatic improvement of city gov-
ernments since then can be traced di-
rectly to the abandonment of the tradi-
tional bicameral system in favor of
unicameralism.17
Voters are in intimate contact with
city governments and have a good under-
standing of unicameralism. Voters also
have some knowledge of corporate struc-
ture with its strong parallels to unicam-
eralism. Further, it is widely known that
17 Shepard, supra note 4, at 535.
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Nebraska has experimented successfully
with unicameralism. Under these cir-
cumstances, unicameralism can no longer
be passed off as something strange and
untried to be rejected in favor of the
"traditional" bicameral government.
Not only do unicameralists dispute the
merits of every claim made for bicamer-
alism, they assert that bicameralism has
a number of positive disadvantages.
First among the disadvantages is the
conference committee. This committee,
it is claimed, often functions as a secret
"third" chamber, unaccountable to the
electorate. Further, compromise mea-
sures as reported out by the conference
committee must be accepted or rejected
by each house in toto without opportu-
nity for amendment. Since the work of
the conference committee is carried out in
secret and sometimes hastily, unicamer-
alists claim the conference committee is
not only undersirable but a negation of
the claim that bicameralism assures a
check to prevent faultily drawn legisla-
tion. A student of the conference com-
mittee as it functioned in Nebraska be-
fore the adoption of unicameralism in
1934 reported that over 25 per cent of all
measures that were amended by the
second chamber passed through confer-
ence. This same student of the Nebraska
experience also found that almost 70
per cent of all bills considered by the
conference committee were referred to
that committee during the last twenty
days of the legislative session and that
almost 50 per cent of such bills were
referred during the last ten days of the
session.18
18 Burdette, Conference Committees in the
Nebraska Legislature, 30 am. pol. Sci. rev.
1114 (1936); The Conference Committee
Ogre, in unicameral legislatures 117 (B.
Aly ed. 1937), as cited by B. trimble, the
structure of the legislature 14 (1943).
Ill
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