I knew one of these cynics years ago when, as a young reporter, I was covering the Kentucky General Assembly, a rank and randy collection of politicians, though perhaps no worse than those in most other state capitals. In the Kentucky legislature, when things got tense, when there was an especially rancid outrage in the process of enactment, the honorable members often lost their fragile commitment to decorum. In other words, they went wild. Members would stomp and holler out of turn.
They would throw papers in the air and storm hysterically around the carpeted chamber like collegians embarking on a panty raid.
Frankly, I loved those moments of democratic frenzy. The wildness shocked by simplistic notions of how government functions. Nothing in the textbooks had prepared me for this: the elected representatives of all the people behaving like a mob. Once, during such an outburst, I remarked to the press gallery on what a human zoo was the legislature.
My friend, the old statehouse correspondent, replied with a droll admonition: “If you think these folks are bad, you should see their constituents.”
Words of wisdom, no doubt. In a democracy, he was saying, people get exactly the sort of government they deserve and, based upon the collective sin and error of human nature, do not look for much improvement.
profoundly conservative sentiment, which I refused to believe at the time. Indeed, I spent the next 20 years watching representative government at different levels, including Congress, and was often reminded of his observation. But I clung to a faith that democratic government could be more than the sum total of all of our warts.
We are about to find out, as a nation, whether the old statehouse correspondent was right. The “new federalism” which the Reagan administration is laboring to create by the devolution of federal powers to state governments is really, I think, an attempt to recreate the political practices and prejudices which dominated places like the Kentucky legislature a generation ago. The principle of the “new federalism” was better known in those days as “states’ rights,” and we are about to discover whether much has changed. I’m skeptical.
State legislatures somehow attract the most engaging and improbable characters. My favorite was a good old boy from deep in the mountains of southeastern Kentucky, State Sen. O. O. (Double O) Duncan, who manager to serve 16 years in that loquacious assembly and never gave a speech, never even introduced a bill.
Just sat there for 16 years and voted. When he retired, I asked him why he never gave a speech. Double O explained that he never had anything he needed to say.
I also learned about “graveyard politics,” as a utility company lobbyist called it late one night in the marble corridor when the General Assembly was stuck, unable to adjourn and unable to pass the little old bill that the governor demanded.
The bill, which had something to do with utility rates, was stalled, the lobbyist explained, because the lieutenant governor was mad at the adjutant general of the National Guard over an unfulfilled patronage promise.
What did utility rates have to do with the National Guard? Nothing, the lobbyist explained, except as a device for getting even.
And I learned about the “bag men” whose names and faces were well known around the hallways. Governors and newspapers made occasional accusations, but it was almost never proved when the legislators were bought.
In Kentucky, for some obscure reason, the legislative measures involved were called “turkey” bills (in Maryland, they are called “snakes”), when everyone knows there is money riding on them.
A friend of mine, a legislator with a piquant sense of duty, once arranged for a wild turkey to be released from the spectators’ gallery during debate on a particularly stenchful piece of legislation. The bird flew frantically across the House chamber and roosted on the speaker’s desk. A doorman took it out in the hall and strangled it.
Sometimes, in drunken moments of frankness, the representatives would brag about it. One of them told me once that a developer had greased the passage of a zoning amendment so he could build a new subdivision.
On the eve of the vote, the developer and the city reached a compromise on the zoning and he tried to call off the legislation, but the assembly went ahead and passed it anyway. These were honest politicians: Once bought, they stayed bought.
State legislatures are like that, even some of the exceptional ones that have been laboratories for progressive programs later adopted nationally.
They are fundamentally intriguing because the collisions of powerful interests are so naked and visible, fascinating in the same way one is compelled to stop and gawk at a grisly accident on the highway.
This is what we will be watching in the years ahead, I suspect, as the program forces more and more of the collisions away from Washington and back to the state capitals. Not pretty, not exalting.
