Our state legislators didn’t waste any time when they got together for a brand-new session in January 2023. The Democratic Party’s majority in the House and in the Senate moved swiftly to pass bills that had been stalled during the previous four years while the Republicans had a majority in the Senate.
We’re on a roll in Minnesota where the Democrats are celebrating their “trifecta” — controlling the House, the Senate and the Governor’s office. There have been more than 10,000 bills introduced by our legislators during the current biennium — more than 5,500 this year alone.
The Republicans haven’t been sitting on their hands, either. Many of those bills come from their side of the aisle. The Revisor’s Office is swamped, weeks behind putting preliminary drafts into formal language that most likely will never have a hearing.
Governing has become more complicated over the years, but our habits haven’t changed. Politics is a partisan business with decisions on almost every issue made in the majority party’s caucus — a private meeting of members, out of public sight. Should a bill get to the floor for a vote, there will be no surprises. Caucus discipline holds tight.
“Keeping the team together,” always with an eye on the next election, is a political routine. At the end of each legislative session, the majority party will tell us that they’ve acted in the interest of the people and produced the results expected of them. The minority will be critical, point to an overreach of authority, decry new spending and object to policies that ignore tradition and accepted practice.
We’re missing the point.
Instead of rushing to introduce thousands of bills, legislators could better prepare for their work by spending time at the beginning of each session doing something more important: listening!
It’s not a new idea.
The old Chautauqua Movement could teach our legislators a lesson. The Chautauqua began in the 1870s and remained popular across the country into the 1930s. They were a kind of tent meeting that moved from place to place across the country, where ideas and entertainment were the attractions. The audience listened to authors, professors and preachers, performers, politicians and others, eager to learn and be entertained. Teddy Roosevelt called it “the most American thing in America.”
State legislators could begin each session with a Legislative Chautauqua, a couple of weeks listening to scientists, business owners and union members, economists, scientists and humanists, educators and novelists and each other — away from their familiar seats in the chamber. No votes, just talking about how to serve their constituents, about working together to protect, enhance and sustain the well-being of their state — and how all of those things fit together.
Put the discussion on TV, radio and online. Viewers and readers could talk about the ideas in classrooms, book clubs, barbershops, church study groups, break rooms, union halls, wherever. A little civic nourishment without the theater of overproduced presidential debates or the rehearsed sound bites on the evening news would be nothing but good for us.
A Legislative Chautauqua could help legislators agree on an agenda — the compelling choices before them — anticipating problems, enhancing our lives, protecting the natural world and respecting the breadth of relationships that sustain our state and region. Where are our deepest differences and how might agreement be found?
There will be some who object to the proposal as a waste of time, ridicule reference to the habit of listening to each other and call the suggestion naive. That’s fine if you accept there’s nothing more to learn than what you already know, that hearing ideas different from your own is of little value, or that you already know how you’re going to vote on every issue.
But that’s not the best we can do.
Let’s bring a Legislative Chautauqua to the Capitol and see where it might take us. The common experience of listening and talking together for a couple of weeks could blur the boundaries of Red and Blue, reveal the complexities of overriding issues — generational poverty, environmental stewardship, our economic relationships and our civic life — and the ways in which they fit together.
A new politics of listening — challenging one’s own assumptions, hearing the reasons behind another’s convictions — can become a habit of legislation. Acknowledging that public problem solving is an opportunity to ask questions without intimidation; searching for answers as a team rather than besmirching another member’s intentions would lead to better law-making.
The majority of a state House or Senate may slide from one side of the chamber to the other after any election. If our current habit of separating Our Side from Theirs continues, our constituents will be marginalized by the political interests of their elected representatives.
Teddy Roosevelt’s “most American thing in America” — an honest, respectful and enlightening exchange among those who govern our states — is, these days, a politics less traveled. Those elected to public office could make it happen. The rest of us would benefit.
Steve Sandell, of Woodbury, served in the Minnesota House from 2019-2023.
