Who knew it was possible? State legislators are actually talking about reforming the Byzantine ways of the state Capitol. 

Reform has been forced onto the table by a number of factors. The Brennan Center at NYU recently released an exhaustive study of the state legislature that rated it the worst in the country in terms of how it operates and its chronic inability to get things done. Three incumbents actually lost their seats in the primary election last month, the most rare of rarities. And 20 years of late budgets and unresolved issues like creating a fairer education funding system and reforming the Rockefeller drug laws are just the latest illustration of an arthritic legislature incapable of doing its job. 

Proposals from the Brennan report are making their way into campaigns for the state legislature this fall. Seventeen members of the Assembly, including Jeffrey Dinowitz and Jeffrey Klein, have co-sponsored a resolution that calls for changing procedures that actually discourage the participation of members in the legislative process. They include: giving each committee the power, which currently resides with the speaker, to hire and fire its own staff, thereby making staff less beholden to leadership and more responsive to committee chairs and the needs of their policy area; making attendance at committee hearings mandatory; and requiring all floor votes to be "slow roll-call votes," which means that members’ votes would be counted only when members are present in the chamber and personally indicate whether they wish to vote "aye" or "nay." Unbelievably, members do 
not have to be present to vote under the current rules. If they are not present, they can allow the speaker to count them as a vote in favor of the legislation in question.

These aren’t radical ideas. They are the most basic foundation for a functioning legislature.

We urge all of our local representatives in Albany to support this resolution and we will be following the progress of these and other measures to reform the legislature.