How To Make Legislatures Start Working For The People Again

At its best, the legislative process is deliberative, merit-based, and responsive to the people. As an Oklahoma state senator, I am here to tell you the legislative process is not at its best.

Rather than deliberative, it is largely a charade where leadership sets the agenda and those who want to climb the ladder to one day become leader show up and vote “Yes” on everything. As South Carolina state Rep. Josiah Magnuson put it, “As some would frame this, we [legislators] only have one job, and that is to come up here and vote ‘Yes.’ … We just need to come up here and vote ‘Yes’ on the budget because all the work has already been done, right? … That would be ridiculous to expect everybody to just come here and push the green button and go home.” 

In the Oklahoma Senate, for instance, 99.2 percent of all bills heard in committee passed, as did 99.4 percent of all legislation heard on the floor. In the Oklahoma Senate, the floor agenda is usually sent less than a day before bills are heard, meaning we have only a few hours to read anywhere from 15 to 90-plus pieces of legislation. So not only are 99 percent of bills passing, but the majority are passing without even being read by those voting on them. It is clear that the committee and floor debates before the public do not mean much. The real decisions are made behind closed doors, and the vote is often just a formality. Showing up, pushing the green button, and going home is how we operate.

Rather than a merit-based system where legislation stands or falls based on how just, constitutional, and good it is for the people, we have a personality-driven system where friends of leadership get dozens of their bills heard and those disfavored by leadership get blackballed. Incentives are everything, and the current system’s incentives are entirely perverse and aimed away from the good of the people. Instead of a free market of ideas where the best bills rise to the top, it is a game where the legislators who most effectively express loyalty to leadership rise. Rather than facilitating a robust competition of ideas and problem-solving, it encourages rivalry and divisiveness as everyone tries to climb the same ladder.

Rather than being responsive to the people, this system is responsive to lobbyists and government agencies. Of course, a legislative system that runs on closed-door meetings and loyalty to the powerful is not going to prioritize constituents. A system run by a handful of leaders rather than the entire chamber is easily highjacked by lobbyists and big government agencies. They don’t have to try to control dozens of legislators. They just need to control one.

There is a solution to this problem, but it means rethinking how we operate as legislative bodies. It means putting an end to business-as-usual, lobbyist-driven politics. Each legislative body, both federally and in each state, has a set of rules that control the process of passing laws, and these rules in virtually every state lead by natural consequence to the above, undesirable outcomes. But it does not have to be this way.

The Golden Rules

My former executive assistant, Brady Butler, has written a comprehensive rules package to alleviate these problems in the system: the Golden Rules. It was written for the Oklahoma Senate, but these problems are present in every chamber in every state in the union — unless you think our governments are doing a great job at being transparent, honest, and responsive to the people. Yeah, I didn’t think so.

The Golden Rules are based on these principles:

1. Transparency — Policies should be debated for the people to watch and have input on rather than all the real negotiations and agreements happening behind closed doors, followed by a quick vote on the floor as a formality.
2. Real and Informed Deliberation — A true deliberative body gives its members time to read each bill and promotes debate on the merits of those bills for the public to see.
3. Equal Representation — Every Oklahoman is equal before the law. Accordingly, their representatives in the legislature should be able to have their policies heard and debated.
4. Answer to the People — The Golden Rules create a system that empowers public comment and in which legislators must make their case to the people in public rather than to leadership and lobbyists behind closed doors.
5. Treat Others as You Wish to be Treated — Vindictive politics is a blight on any government. We must be ambitious in our pursuit of being an idea-driven body rather than a personality-driven body.

Working from these principles, here are the most important specific changes that need to be made in legislative rules packages across the country.

Equal Representation

The most important element of equal representation is decentralizing power by making the leadership more administrative than executive. In recent years, the Oklahoma Senate could have been aptly described as being made up of one super-senator and 47 district figureheads. The pro tem controls who makes up the rest of his leadership team, who sits on what committees, what bills are assigned to what committees, and the purse for spending in support of allies come election time. When one man has the power to pass every one of your bills or kill all of them and destroy you in the next election, of course there is going to be a culture of servile loyalty to those in power. This simply must end. These powers over the chamber must be decentralized. 

In the Golden Rules, we make Oklahoma Senate leader into purely an administrative role:

Rule 1-4. All leadership positions, including but not limited to the President Pro-Tempore, Floor Leader, Officers, and Chairmen, shall be expressly for the purposes of administration only, and shall not in any way be authoritative. Leadership shall serve at the prerogative of the majority in times of good behavior, and shall at all times be subject to discipline up to and including removal from leadership positions subject to a majority vote of the Senate body.

Another crucial element of equal representation is giving each legislator a chance to have bills heard. Instead of a system where 18 senators out of 48 (almost entirely those who support leadership) author 75 percent of the bills heard and passed while some senators got zero bills heard even in committee, we need a system that treats each senator as a duly-elected member of the body. Every legislator represents constituents who deserve to have their voices heard. Silencing a legislator is silencing their constituents. 

One solution is to guarantee each legislator a minimum number of bills heard in committee. Alternatively, we could establish a system where each legislator gives all his or her bills a priority designation beginning with one and going up to however many bills they introduce. Then the job of a committee chair would be to rotate through all the ones, all the twos, and so on so that each legislator gets an equal number of bills heard. 

The argument against this is that it results in bad bills being heard too. So be it! Give us a chance to vote “No” once in a while. Let the out-of-touch-with-reality Democrats present their transgender insanity before the people and get crushed in debate and the vote. 

What this argument actually comes down to is the establishment not wanting to be forced to vote on truly conservative legislation that they oppose but their constituents support. They would rather conservative priorities die quietly behind closed doors without a public hearing than have to go on the record. This is a fundamental warping of representative government. When legislators can quietly kill important legislation rather than having to do so publicly, the people never really know where their representatives stand. Equal representation fixes this problem.

Seven-Day Layover to Read Bills

All legislation, substitutes, and amendments should be required to be on a public agenda for a substantial amount of time before a hearing or a vote to ensure that senators have ample time to read, research, refine, and collaborate on all measures being voted on. In our Oklahoma proposal, we would require all bills being heard to be made public seven days before the hearing. This allows legislators time to actually find out what is in the legislation they are voting on. Crazy, I know.

As U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., often exposes, it is not unusual for federal legislators to be given hours to read thousand-page legislation. The practice of passing legislation so we can find out what is in it must not be allowed to continue.

Public Comment

Twelve states, Oklahoma included, do not allow constituent input in the legislative process in the form of committee testimony. This is an outrageous silencing of the voice of the people. There is no reason to exclude the public from being able to testify except to further remove constituents from the lawmaking process.

Paid Lobbyist Transparency

A bug of American politics, particularly at the federal level, that needs fixing if we are going to get out of the financial catastrophe we are headed for is getting paid lobbying under control. The insane items in Paul’s annual Festivus Report and the earmarks exposed regularly by Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., are a serious scandal. This is, to a significant degree, the result of paid lobbyists. Big corporations pay lobbyists hundreds of thousands of dollars because they get more money back than they spend, sometimes corruptly.

In the Golden Rules, we deal with this problem with Rule 5-5:

All lobbyist being paid for lobbying activities shall wear a name tag with the following information visibly displayed: [1] Name, [2] The original source entity paying for the current lobbying activity in the following format: ‘LOBBYING ACTIVITY PAID FOR BY____________,’ [3] The address of the entity paying for the lobbying activity.

Make Deliberative Bodies Deliberative Again

These rules changes and others aimed at decentralizing power in the legislative branch are necessary if the people are to take back control of our government from the lobbyists and bureaucrats. Without structural change that empowers the people, little positive change can be expected.

This week, all across the country, Republican caucuses will meet to discuss rules packages for the upcoming session. Before they do, tell your representatives to work toward a government that is deliberative, transparent, and responsive to the people. With a massive rightward swing in the 2024 primaries in many states, a massive Republican victory in the general, and the backing of influential figures like Elon Musk, anti-establishment energy is at an all-time high. Now is the time to decentralize legislatures and make deliberative bodies great again.

Dusty Deevers is a pastor at Grace Reformed Baptist Church of Elgin in Elgin, Oklahoma. He is also the state senator for Oklahoma Senate District 32 and a small business owner. He lives in Elgin with his wife and six children.