Politics & Other Mistakes: Diminishing returns

6 mins read
Al Diamon
Al Diamon

As Donald Trump has so colorfully reminded us, size matters. Nobody wants to be perceived as … er … teeny weenie.

Given the populist belief that bigger is better, it’s difficult to understand the logic that drives persistent efforts to reduce the size of the Maine Legislature. As pitiful as the current House (151 denizens) and Senate (35 critters) have been, there’s nothing to indicate that a legally mandated shrinkage would improve their performance.

The most recent legislative shriveling initiative splashed down like a cold shower from Republican Gov. Paul LePage in March. LePage has always been fairly balanced in his support for contraction (government spending, solar power, Democrats) and expansion (manufacturing, mining, his waistline). But when the guv introduced his proposal, his spokesman said cutting the Senate to 25 seats and the House to 100 was necessary because the current configuration made it “hard to work together, keep everyone informed and get work done.”

Of course, the same could be said of the governor, and no one is claiming that sweating 50 pounds of blubber off his gut would improve performance.

Over the years, misguided reformers from both major political parties have advocated for a smaller Legislature, claiming it would increase efficiency. There’s no evidence of that in states like Rhode Island, where there are only 113 legislators, but the economy sucks and corruption runs rampant. Meanwhile, New Hampshire, with 424 senators and representatives, enjoys boom times and minimal graft.

It could be argued that cutting the size of the legislative appendage is another one of those feel-good reforms – such as term limits, publicly financed campaigns, ranked choice voting, recycling congressional candidate Emily Cain – that produce no discernable improvements in the body politic. But there’s another reason to resist efforts to chop off a sizable portion of the legislative branch:

It would leave rural Maine with almost no representation.

Actually, rural Maine doesn’t have much in the way of representation now. Most districts are of LePage-like dimensions, and most legislators already come from larger municipalities. A smaller Legislature would exacerbate that problem. Add to that the demographic trends that have seen steady out-migration from the state’s economically depressed countryside, and the next census could leave Aroostook County, which is bigger than Rhode Island, with less representation than the average North Korean peasant.

If Maine had only 25 senators, it’s probable that 15 of them would come from the 10 largest cities. While LePage might have deluded himself into believing that fewer senators would be easier to deal with, he apparently hasn’t noticed that most of the state’s biggest municipalities are heavily Democratic. Likewise in the House, losing 51 seats would hasten the shift of power from northern Maine, where the GOP has an edge, to the southern part of the state, where Dems prevail. Reduction would likely leave LePage with a Legislature firmly in the hands of the opposition.

It’s worth noting that this scenario is almost certainly going to occur over time, even if there’s no legislative deflation. As mills continue to close and forestry jobs disappear, the entire half of Maine north of Bangor will gradually revert to wilderness interrupted by meth labs and the occasional national park advocate. Legislative representation in these sparsely inhabited regions will become the responsibility of absentee officials in distant locations.

At least, they won’t have to put up with the meth stink.

Whenever these issues are raised, certain individuals – whom I’ll politely refer to as drug-addled numbnuts – always announce that the solution is returning Maine to the system it once used of allocating two senators to each county. In this way, the few remaining residents of Piscataquis, Somerset and Franklin counties would have as much influence in the upper chamber as those of Cumberland, York and Androscoggin, where most of the state’s population resides. Trouble is, this arrangement violates the U.S. Supreme Court’s one-person-one-vote rule. It also grants more political juice to trees than people.

What LePage and other shrinkage advocates don’t seem to understand is that the Legislature, like Congress, is inefficient by design. The drafters of the state and federal constitutions erected these obstructions because they recognized that citizens needed to be protected from ill-considered laws proposed by small-minded demagogues.

And that was huge.

Cut me down to size by emailing aldiamon@herniahill.net.

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8 Comments

  1. LePage probably wants to reduce representation because he is a natural born dictator

  2. frumpy…. tell me of your fav politicians and tell me they don’t think they are smarter and know what is best for us… it is the nature of the beast…

  3. Spot on Glen.
    Politicians are all bullies.

    Look at Trump and Clinton.

    If anyone won’t admit this then its because of the kool aid,
    Truth.

  4. Actually one of Diamon’s better articles. Some politicians seem pretty decent and well-meaning, Lincoln for one.

  5. “If Maine had only 25 senators, it’s probable that 15 of them would come from the 10 largest cities.”

    Maine’s 10 largest municipalities as of the 2010 census with population and number of 1/25ths of Maine’s population (1,328,361):

    Portland 66,194 1.2458
    Lewiston 36,592 0.6887
    Bangor 33,039 0.6218
    South Portland 0.4705
    Auburn 23,055 0.4339
    Biddeford 21,277 0.4004
    Sanford 20,798 0.3914
    Brunswick 20,278 0.3816
    Augusta 19,136 0.3601
    Scarborough 18,919 0.3561

    From the recently released Census Bureau population estimates as of July 1, 2015 (state total estimate 1,329,328):

    Portland 66,881 1.2578
    Lewiston 36,202 0.6808
    Bangor 32,391 0.6092
    South Portland 25,556 0.4806
    Auburn 22,871 0.4301
    Biddeford 21,282 0.4002
    Sanford 20,893 0.3929
    Brunswick 20,495 0.3854
    Scarborough 19,691 0.3703
    Saco 19,078 0.3588

    How do you get 15 Senators from that? Portland could perhaps still have two (somewhat doubtful though as the other 74% of the Senate district covering the “remainder” of Portland might be reluctant to support a Portland candidate), but the other 9 towns could only have more than one if they were split between Senate districts, and if they were split would be more likely to have no Senator from their municipality than two. Not all of them would likely have their district’s Senator from that municipality even if they weren’t split. Saco and Biddeford might be in the same Senate district in this scenario.

    I get the point you’re trying to make, but I thought I’d point it out here that the numbers don’t back up the claim that 15 Senators out of 25 would be from the 10 largest municipalities (for the 10 largest cities you’d lose Brunswick and Scarborough and gain smaller Saco (2010)/Augusta (2015) and Westbrook, making it even less likely).

  6. I don’t think the State Senate should be made any smaller, but with the State House you sometimes have to divide some pretty small towns, like Pownal, that are split between districts. (Not that Pownal had to be split, but when the Freeport-Pownal House district had to shed some territory in 2003 (but couldn’t just be Freeport) and the State Representative from that district was from Freeport, what do you think’s going to happen?) Also, 151, the current size of the House, is not a multiple of 35 (151 is prime, actually), so you end up having several House districts consisting of territory within two or more Senate districts, even though the Senate districts are larger. Lewiston right now is a rare case of nesting, with four House districts averaging on the large side coinciding with one smallish (but within range) Senate district. I think 35-140 would be a good setup, but usually people propose something like 33-99 or 35-105 when their proposing to reduce the size of the Legislature.

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