Wanted: Ideas for cutting the high cost of official prosecution

Your humble State Worker blogger would like to hear your ideas on how to cut back on the cost of prosecuting so many politicians in this state. We need to save some tax dollars here.

I’ve got one to get the ball rolling: With so many of the state’s legislators going to jail, how about if we fire about 63 of them, so we’d at least have fewer possibilities at prosecution?

Crazy, you say?

Well, here’s an idea floated by Charles Chieppo, a research fellow at the Ash Center of the Harvard Kennedy School: Go unicameral!

He explains it in a recent article in Governing magazine.

Every state except Nebraska has a bicameral legislature, but with the passage of time, it’s a setup that has come to make less sense. Nebraska passed a ballot initiative to create a unicameral legislature in 1934. When it was implemented in 1937, the state’s legislative costs were cut nearly by half.

But cost isn’t the only reason for states to adopt unicameral legislatures. Under the bicameral model, differences between bills passed by the lower and upper houses are hashed out in conference committees whose meetings are not public. Conference committees include only a few legislators, and their deliberations can easily be influenced by lobbyists. A unicameral legislature promotes greater transparency.

Then there is the efficiency of the process, with legislation not having to make its way through two bodies and then a conference committee before arriving on the governor’s desk.

What are your ideas on how to cut back on spiking prosecution costs?

Jeff Waggoner