Legislators are men elected by the people to pass laws that will be executed by the executive branch. In the event that the laws are unconstitutional and illegal it falls to the Judiciary to declare them as such. This is the system of checks and balance that is integral to the Federal government. However if one of these three branches does not work or is inefficient the entire system suffers as a result.
In Still broken: New York state legislative reform. The authors find that, based on their qualitative information they uncovered major problems that were endemic in the New York State Legislature. For example, congressional leadership keeps a bottleneck hold on legislation in all the stages of the legislative process. They also determined that Committee meeting, which were already infrequent to begin with, are sparsely attended. After all, since the Senators can vote without being present they have no incentive to be present.
Furthermore, it would appear that the standing committees in both chambers were not able to hold any hearings for major legislation. There was a dearth of detailed committee reports appended to the major bills in the Senate. This flaw is attributed to the absence of a rule that would require the Assembly to append substantive reports to bills reported out of committee.
Despite the extraordinary number of bills in both houses introduced during each session, only a small percentage received a floor vote. Even more glaring is that all bills that that are sponsored by leadership will reach the voting stage with virtually no debate.
This long litany of flaws makes the New York Legislature inefficient. There are proposals to strengthen the standing committees. In order to do this members must be granted the authority to convene meetings. Committee members can no longer have the luxury of absentee voting they must be present to vote.
The stranglehold that leadership has over bills coming to the floor must end. It must be ended by allowing rank-and-file members to discharge bills from committee and place them on the floor calendar by majority vote. There must be adequate opportunity to consider legislation and not merely railroading bills at the behest of legislative leadership. And finally, provide sufficient opportunity and resources for full consideration of legislation by making use of robust conference committees and distributing member funds equally.
These suggestions were made to improve the New York Legislature but can also be applied to the national level. The problems identified are systemic in the national legislature as well. Therefore, reform bills like the ones being issued for the improvement of the New York Legislature can also be transposed into national legislation.
Finally, lobbyists should be subjected to greater regulation. Lobbyists have an undue advantage in influencing legislatures to pass laws the adhere to their special interest. Hence reform laws should also be proposed that will discourage this practice which has become a large-scale industry in itself.
References
Stengel, Andrew, Norden, Lawrence, Seago, Laura. Still broken: new york state legislative reform 2008. Web.