One House: The Unicameral’s Progressive Vision for Nebraska by Charlyne Berens (review)

In a 1923 New York Times article, US Senator George Norris of Nebraska proposed a radical idea: shrink the Nebraska legislature to a one-house, nonpartisan “unicameral” of no more than fifty members. Norris, later honored in John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1955) for his stand against machine politics, was an astute observer of legislative behavior, a progressive compatriot of “Fighting” Bob LaFollette, and is considered by many to be one of the greats in the US Senate. He offered a number of arguments for his proposal, and chief among them was the elimination of conference committees. Conference committees were, in Norris’s view, the main point of attack for lobbyists and special interests wanting to kill legislation or insert favorable amendments. He further argued that a smaller, nonpartisan legislature would be more independent, more representative, and more efficient. Here I will offer a disclaimer. A Nebraska native, I covered the Unicameral legislature as a journalist for more than ten years, watching its daily deliberations.

Charlyne Berens’s One House: The Unicameral’s Progressive Vision for Nebraska examines Norris’s arguments and the history of the Unicameral, asking the questions, did it work? Did the Nebraska Unicameral function more efficiently? Is it more representative, and is it less vulnerable to the machinations of special interests? Behrens’s second edition of One House includes a lengthy new introduction that explores, among other things, the impact of term limits on a one-house legislature, a phenomenon that has largely become a factor in the years following the book’s original publication in 2005. The book concludes with the text of both Norris’s New York Times article and his 1934 Model Legislature speech.

Oral history is only one of several methodologies that Berens uses in examining the history of the Unicameral. She makes use of other standard sources in concert with oral history, including survey questionnaires, newspaper files, editorial comment, archival documents, legislative records, and the texts of speeches by Norris and others. Together these sources provide a comprehensive picture of the development of Nebraska’s legislature. Berens does not provide information about the methodology employed in the interviews she conducted nor information regarding the archival repository for the interviews.

Berens chronicles the development of the 1934 Nebraska constitutional amendment that established the Unicameral, as well as an earlier attempt in 1923 that failed to garner enough signatures, providing the context for the Unicameral’s first session in 1937. From there she tracks the development of the philosophical underpinnings of the institution, measuring the development against the theoretical arguments that Norris and his supporter, John Senning, advanced. Interviews with former legislators, adding their perspective on how the flat hierarchy and lack of partisan structure affected the debate over issues and the development of legislation, add firsthand insight on the development of committee structure, changes in legislative rules, and the development of the legislative process.

The mechanics of that distribution of power in the Nebraska legislature is one of the more interesting issues she tracks. Until recently, the Speaker had nothing like the kind of power wielded by speakers in other legislatures and still is less powerful than most. This, as Berens explains, grew from Norris’s insistence that the legislature have a nonpartisan, nonhierarchical structure. Norris wanted individual legislators to have as much involvement in the discussion of issues and crafting of legislation as possible. That would only be possible if there were no party whips, if there was no concentration of power, and if the smaller number of legislators discouraged individual lawmakers from becoming too specialized. Nebraska state senators are, as former State Senator and Lieutenant Governor Dave Maurstad is quoted as observing, “forty-nine independent contractors” (113). An issue that emerges in more than one section of the book is the decades-old rural-urban dichotomy in the Nebraska legislature. The eastern portion of the state, with the state’s...