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Much of today's General Assembly structure
comes from COOGA of the sixties

COOGA revisited


Harold Katz

Commission on the Organization of the General Assembly, Representative Harold A. Katz, Chairman. COOGA: 10 years later/Report on the implementation of the 87 recommendations made in 1967 by the Illinois Commission on the Organization of the General Assembly (May 1977), 60 pp.

HAROLD KATZ was the sponsor of the legislation in the 1965 General Assembly which created the Commission on the Organization of the General Assembly, and he was — and has been — its chairman, so that it would have been logical to call it the Katz Commission, and many did, except that former Sen. W. Russell Arrington insisted on calling it "COOGA," an acronym so distinctive that it stuck and now is officially acknowledged in the title of the commission's latest report.

Looking back, what Harold Katz accomplished as a freshman legislator in 1965 in obtaining passage of H.B. 163 was remarkable. He had two things working in his favor: (1) support for the idea of streamlining the legislature by one of the most remarkable men of our time to sit in the Illinois Senate, W. Russell Arrington, a Republican multimillionaire from Evanston, and (2) the extraordinary events that had led to the election of a House with 118 Democrats and 59 Republicans, many of them able, ambitious new members, exemplified best, perhaps, by Adlai E. Stevenson III, who launched his political career by topping the Democratic ticket in the 1964at-large election for the House (see accompanying box).

Would Katz — a Democrat from the Republican North Shore — have ever made it to the legislature without the unprecedented at-large election? Certainly if he had, the legislature would not have cottoned to his reformist ideas. It had been the kind of a legislature that frequently bypassed its own committees by advancing bills without committee consideration.

But Katz was not a greenhorn about Springfield. He had been one of the young attorneys whom Dawn dark Netsch (then Dawn dark), as legal aide to Gov. Kerner, had summoned to Springfield at the close of each session to help her review bills. Kerner's vetoes made an excellent record for him from the viewpoint of Democratic party liberals; Ms. dark saw that the messages were printed and easily accessible.

A Kerner veto, as it turned out, brought Katz to the House along with many other high-minded newcomers bent on reform. But the Senate was still unrepentant and unreformed in 1965. Yet even there unusual things were happening, and the most unusual was the election of Arrington as president pro tempore of the Senate. Arrington had served in the House from 1945 to 1954, when he was elected to the Senate. As a Legislative Council member, Kartz, along with then state Rep. Abner J. Mikva, had sponsored the Legislative Staff Internship Program which was to teach legislators the usefulness of staff and provide much of the early talent for staffing.

A bill similar to that sponsored by Katz had been introduced by Harris W. Fawell, a Republican from Naperville who in 1963 had been voted "best fresh man senator" in a poll of downstate newsmen. Although Arrington helped push Fa well's bill, the Katz bill was eventually signed into law by Gov. Kerner. Fawell became vice chairman of the commission, and Marjorie Pebworth, a first-term Republican representative, became secretary. Arrington as president pro tempore of the Senate was an ex officio member as was John P. Touhy, then speaker of the House, now chairman of the Democratic State Central Committee. (The 1977 publication lists the full membership of the original COOGA.)

It is a measure of the unusual successes of COOGA that a current reading of how the 1967 recommendations have been implemented produces a "so-what-is-new?" reaction. The Senate, for example, installed electronic voting equipment in 1974 — seven years after the recommendation was made and at least a quarter of a century after the House stopped relying solely on oral roll calls. But when this sensible suggestion was first made by COOGA, Senators refused to listen.

Other procedural changes include schedule of legislative deadlines to move bills ahead toward the traditional June 30 adjournment in order to avoid a crush of business, the "logjam" in the closing days and nights of the session.

WILLIAM L. DAY
As research director of the Legislative Council (1960-1974), he served through a period of legislative reform.

4/ April 19781 Illinois Issues



W. Russell Arrington

Movement of bills to passage without a committee hearing is almost unheard of now a days, but it was common practice in 1965 and before. COOGA's first report said that about a third of the bills in 1965 moved to passage without ever being considered in committee. Proxy voting has been outlawed in committees although some say proxy votes are still accepted in some Senate committees. Bills carry on their face a synposis bills must be processed by the Lgislative Reference Bureau to assure correctness of form.

Recommendations to enable legislaltors to do their job better have also been implemented. When Katz came as a freshman representative he found he had only a desk in the chamber to work at, and he had to depend on help from a stenographic pool to answer letters. Legislators now have offices and secretaries in Springfield and money to help cover the cost of an office and staff in their districts; the committees and the leadership have space to meet and work in Chicago; and the staff has been expanded in the auxiliary agencies to the General Assembly such as Legislative Council, Reference Bureau and State Library government reference section.

Much of what COOGA proposed had to wait for constitutional change, and this change started with another commission, the Commission to Study the Constitution, chaired by the same Marjorie Pebworth who was secretary of COOGA. She died from diabetes and overwork before the resolution to call a constitutional convention was adopted by the House in 1967. In a sense, the Constitution of 1970 that resulted is a memorial to the efforts of this woman who in her youth worked for the Indiana Legislative Reference Bureau in Indianapolis (she was a Hoosier and is buried in that state) and who became familiar with the Illinois

Setting the stage
for legislative reform

The chain of events which eventually led to COOGA and a new Constitution began in 1948 when Adlai E. Stevenson, of Adlai III, took office as governor. He wanted a new constitution, but the legislature would not place the question of calling a convention on the ballot, so Gov. Stevenson settled for a "gateway amendment" to make it possible to amend the 1870 Constitution which had not been changed in 40 years. The nonpartisan campaign which led to adoption of the 1950 gateway amendment was headed by a Chicago lawyer, Samuel W. Witwer, later president of the Constitutional Convention of 1969-70.

But it was Gov. Stevenson's successor, Gov. William G. Stratton, who engineered the first fundamental reform of the legislature in half a century by obtaining legislative approval of a reapportionment amendment in 1953 and its popular ratification at the polls in 1954. The legislature had last been apportioned in 1903. From then on, Chicago's growing population threatenend to give Chicago and Cook County conntrol of both houses if population were the basis for the apportionment of districts as the 1870 Constitution directed, but downstate lawmakers side tracked apportionment bills. The Stratton amendment offered a compromise: the House was to be apportioned according to population (which could give Cook County control), but Cook County was to be limited to 24 of the 58 Senate districts with Chicago getting 18 of the 24 districts.

Enactment of a reapportionment law in 1955 was pushed through under threat of two extraordinary provisions written into the 1954 reapportionment amendment: First, if the legislature did not act by July 1, a bipartisan commission would make the apportionment. The commission was to consist of five Democrats and five Republicans, chosen by the governor from lists submitted by the central committees of the two major parties. Second, if the commission failed to reapportion by December 31, all 177 members of the House were to be elected — not by districts — but at large across the state. It was thought prudent to write into the reapportionment amendment the fall back on the commission and at-large election in case the legislature again failed to reapportion.

When reapportionment was required again in 1963, a bill was passed by the Republican majorities in both houses, and then an unanticipated event occurred: a veto. Gov. Otto Kerner's veto message cited disparities among districts in population such that the largest district had 74 per cent more population than the smallest. He cited as an example Lake County, with 293,656 population and growing, which constituted one district. Twelve other districts, he said, had a population less than half of this district.

The veto occurred after sine die (final) adjournment of the legislature, and there was no chance to act on it, and anyway the Republicans lacked the necessary two-thirds majorities required by the 1870 Constitution to override. So, the commission was formed. Republican and Democratic state central committees submitted their lists of 10 names each to Kerner, and he appointed five from each. Commission negotiations continued for months behind closed doors. As the December 31, 1963 deadline approached, the press kept a vigil on the conference room in Chicago; midnight passed — no plan. Illinois awoke on New Year's Day 1964 with a special hangover, the prospect of an at-large election for 177 state representatives.

Instead of a Republican majority in the House, the Democrats won a top-heavy majority of 118 to 59 Republicans in the November 1964 election.

April 19781 Illinois Issues/5


legislature as an unpaid lobbyist for the League of Women Voters.

The efforts of Arrington, Katz, Pebworth and many others have changed the Illinois legislature from an assembly that reacted and often went along with the recommendations of the governor to a body which itself initiates and fights for its own conceived programs. One may or may not admire overriding the governor's vetoes of the laetrile bill and the bill to ban abortions at public expense, but what one needs to realize is in the century from 1870 to 1969 only four vetoes were overridden. The 1967 COOGA report found that "Executive vetoes have killed between an eighth and a sixth of the bills passed by the Illinois General Assembly in recent sessions." Because the legislature was in the habit of adjourning sine die— that is, finally and without recourse — on June 30, it never had the opportunity to act on vetoes. As a result of COOGA's recommendations, the General Assembly found it could return in the fall of 1967 and 1969 to act on vetoes. And so on January 8,1969, in its dying hours, the 75th General Assembly overrode Gov. Sam Shapiro's veto of a legislative pay raise — the fourth override in a century. Overrides of vetoes have become much more usual since, in part because of the relaxed requirement to override in the 1970 Constitution (a three-fifths vote in each house instead of two-thirds) and in part because of the conflict between the governor and the legislature.

Gov. Richard B. Ogilvie deserves the credit for implementing another COOGA recommendation, that no legislative agency should participate in pre-budget hearings. COOGA in 1967 had charged that as a result of this participation, "Whether budget figures represent choices made by the Governor or choices made by a legislative commission is ... a question shrouded in mystery." But the legislative Budgetary Commission survived until Ogilvie created a Bureau of the Budget and denied the commission access to agency budget requests in the preparatory stage. In 1972 the legislature abolished the Budgetary Commission or, at least, reshaped it into the Economic and Fiscal Commission.

The COOGA report is evidence of the ability of a state legislature to learn how to manage its business better and to secure changes in the Constitution, but the success of COOGA and others in converting the legislature from a reactive to an initiating body has brought about extreme demands that legislators a generation ago would have considered outrageous. Consider these figures:

1963 1975-76*
Days in session: House 70 177
Days in session: Senate 72 157
Bills introduced 2,916 4,584
Bills enacted 1,444 1,297
Per cent enacted 50% 28%
* To July 1, 1976

COOGA: 10 years later documents a tremendous enhancement of the capacity of the legislature to play its role as one of the three branches of state government

It may be that it takes this much time and effort for the legislature to perform as a true check on the executive branch of state government. But there are signs that the legislature is losing its character as a body which represents the average citizen and shares his or her concerns by viewing legislating as a secondary occupation. In the 1963-64 session, only seven members listed their occupation as "legislator." In the 1975-76 session, 75 did so. What this means, of course, is that these individuals consider being a lawmaker their primary occupation. Theoretically this should reduce their independence. Has it done so? This is hard to measure, but on the whole we have a legislature that seems much more independent than the legislature was 20 years ago. At least, it is more independent of the governor, but it may be more susceptible to special interest groups.

It is undeniable that COOGA: 10 years later documents a tremendous enhancement of the capacity of the legislature to play its role as one of the three coordinate branches of state government, by reforming procedure and by equipping legislators with the tools to do a good job. But as a lawmaking body, the legislature is far from perfection. One can overlook, perhaps, a drug conviction thrown out in court (as happened last fall in Cook County) because the legislative act misspelled the name of the drug. And perhaps the achievement, some decades after the idea was first broached, of a consolidated schedule of elections is great enough to excuse the errors in the bill that was passed last spring--halving the terms of some elected municipal officials for example. (The 1977 fall session corrected the errors.) But why hasn't the legislature ever gotten around to implementing COOGA Recommendation No. 75, for "adoption of an official code of laws and for its continuous revision as to form?" The 1977 report merely says ",This subject is being explored...." (See Richard M. Hull, "Computer paves way for new code of Illinois laws," Feb. 1976 pp. 17-19.)

Some legislators object to the governor's amendatory veto, but it was created as an attempt to provide a quick solution to technical errors in bills, and these errors do continue to occur. From 1963 to 1975, in response to impetus from COOGA, the professional staff of the legislature, excluding its auxiliary agencies, increased from a score of people to more than a hundred, and expenditures by the legislature on itself (again excluding auxiliary agencies) rose from $6.9 million to $23.6 million. Why is not the legislative product technically better? Who reads bills before they are finally acted on?

Why did the legislature wait until the 1977 fall session, which was almost the last minute before a federal deadline, to pass amendments to the unemployment compensation law so as to avoid heavy federal tax burdens for noncompliance? Why did the legislature take 14 months to agree on a constitutionally and politically acceptable State Board of Elections bill?

In what some still call the"good old days," the governor of lllinois, the mayor of Chicago and legislative leaders worked out the answers to problems of this kind — something that staff, no matter how brilliant, cannot do. Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that when Dan Walker was in the executive mansion (1973-1977), Illinois had no governor in the traditional sense, just as today Chicago has found no equal to Richard J. Daley as a mayor. Or it may well be that this new kind of a legilature, one that does not react but initiates, still has to evolve its owns internal patterns of leadership and problem solving.

6/ April 1978/ Illinois Issues


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