No Modern Experiments with a Parliamentary System in the States

by Karl Kurtz

If the states are famously the "laboratories of democracy," then why has no state ever adopted a parliamentary system of government? 

That question occurred to me when I read yesterday's New York Times story about Bob Kelleher, the 85 year old surprise Republican nominee against Montana Sen. Max Baucus who has run afoul of his own party's leadership:

So what is the problem with Mr. Kelleher? Well, for one thing, he is almost certainly the only major party candidate anywhere who has pledged (as he did in previous campaigns) to scrap a cornerstone of the Constitution.

He wants to replace the equal branches of executive, legislative and judicial government with a parliamentary democracy patterned on England’s, with a prime minister who would lead both the executive and legislative branches. Under the change, the speaker of the House of Representatives would take the first prime minister’s chair.

The idea of the current speaker, Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, as a prime-minister-in-waiting has most certainly not endeared Mr. Kelleher to the Republican powers that be.

“Separation of powers is ruining this country,” Mr. Kelleher, a lawyer, said in defense of the proposal in an interview in his tiny, cluttered apartment, where a dog wandered in and out and friends periodically shouted up the stairs to see if anyone was home.

Kelleher's quest to change the U.S. Constitution seems quixotic at best, but at the state level, if Nebraska can have a unicameral, it seems surprising that no state has experimented with a parliamentary form of government.  From time to time we hear of bills being introduced to make such a change at the state level.  Rep. Phyllis Kahn introduced a proposal for a parliamentary system in Minnesota in 2000, but it was dead on arrival in the legislature.  Curious if any bills have even been introduced in the current biennium, I searched NCSL's 50-State Bill Information Service to find out.  Our best searchers at NCSL couldn't find a single bill proposing to convert a state to a parliamentary system.

If we go back far enough in American history, though, the parliamentary form of government has been tried: in the first state constitutions adopted in Georgia and Pennsylvania the legislature elected the governor, as in the British parliamentary system.  But by the beginning of the 19th century, both states had adoped the then-radical separation of powers system of the federal government and the rest of the states (see "The Golden Age of State Legislatures").

The separation of powers system is so ingrained in American political culture today that a parliamentary system in which the legislature elects the executive is likely never to be seriously considered. 

But one element of the Westminster parliamentary model, the question period in which the chief executive and ministers appear before the legislature, has been proposed and discussed numerous times at the federal level.  In fact, Sen. John McCain earlier this year said that as President he would “ask Congress to grant me the privilege of coming before both Houses to take questions and address criticism, much the same as the Prime Minister of Great Britain appears regularly before the House of Commons.” The Congressional Research Service has written a very interesting and thorough history and evaluation of this idea, "A Parliamentary-Style Question Period: Proposals and Issues for Congress."

Minnesota's Rep. Kahn recalls that the Minnesota Legislature used to have the power to call the governor before it to answer questions but that the provision was removed from the rules (constitution?) in the late 1990s.  Do any other states have a provision for a question period?  If so, is it ever used?