Abolish the state Legislature

New Yorkers who’ve been failed over the decades by the politicians who claim to represent us finally have a way to cure our ills. This November, a vote in favor of a constitutional convention gives us the chance not just to reform the system around the edges, but to eliminate the state Legislature.

That’s right: abolish this cancer in Albany that blights our democracy by choosing its voters rather than we choosing our representatives; that wastes our taxes on profligate, duplicative government; that feeds its contributors at the expense of the poor, homeless and uneducated; and, too often, slimes itself in corruption.

All of the reforms that cry out to make New York the progressive, humane state it can be depend not on enacting a series of reforms, all of which are sure to be watered down by those in power, but on eliminating the Legislature as we know it.

We should approve a constitutional convention, then enter it with a single, clean, overriding objective: Abolishing the Assembly and the Senate and substituting them with a full-time House of Delegates.

This House should be made up of members who represent districts with populations midway between the current Assembly and Senate districts. These districts should be drawn using electoral competition as the primary criteria.

Members should be well paid and equally paid, and the body should have a strict ethics code — barring all outside income and forcing strict disclosure of gifts and other compromising financial interests.

We have been teased long enough by the promise of partial ethics reforms, none of which go far enough, and all of which fail to get through the Legislature, in any event.

A clean slate is literally the only way to build a new culture of transparency and responsiveness in legislative activity that can fulfill the promises that politicians in New York invariably break.

To date, debate about whether or not to OK a constitutional convention has centered on a hodgepodge of other fixes to the Constitution. But all these other hoped-for reforms — the structure of the court system, environmental guarantees, the power relationship between localities and the Legislature, campaign finance reform, true redistricting reform, removing voting barriers, guarantees for equality in education, shelter and care for the homeless and poor, and many more — could be addressed by a truly responsive House of Delegates.

And one house, even one generously financed with truly professional salaries and public financing, will be far less costly than the current two houses, let alone the savings from the elimination of corruption.

Moreover, leadership of such a body would be far more effective at counterbalancing an all-powerful governor. Leadership that avoids the horrible “three men in a room” syndrome and that does not disdain its own members is far more likely when representatives are well-paid fulltimers, not dependent on the beneficence of leadership granted lulus and other emoluments from party funds and donors controlled by leaders.

Ascent to leadership in a reformed unicameral body would require openness and respect for members that simply does not now exist.

It is not as if there is no precedent for creating a one-house legislature here in New York. Though only one state — Nebraska — is unicameral, virtually all localities, counties and cities in New York have unicameral bodies.

In 1989, I won a case in the U.S. Supreme Court that resulted in the abolition of the New York City Board of Estimate. It was clear then that the best reform for the city was to give lawmaking powers to a responsive, unicameral City Council.

Notwithstanding the views of a cadre of nostalgic fixers, there is no question that this has transformed city government from a system of graft among county leaders that controlled the votes of borough presidents into a transparent, responsive, largely progressive, publicly financed, representative democracy.

Finally, there’s something more honest about approaching a constitutional convention as an opportunity to reform our governmental structure rather than as a way to legislate what the Legislature won’t.

Instead of trying to implement a grab-bag wish list of reforms, which will inevitably get dragged into partisan lobbying, the convention should focus minds by democracy with a small “d”: repairing the underlying structure of our representative government.

The frightening military adage that “we had to destroy the village to save it” has political salience in New York State. Starting from legislative scratch makes eminent sense here because of the encrusted, and utterly hopeless, Albany culture.

Let’s direct our energies at the root problem: the current state Legislature.