Unicameral

A unicameral legislature is a single-chamber governing body. Only one state, Nebraska, has a unicameral legislature, but city, county, and town councils typically consist of a single body.

Under the Articles of Confederation adopted in 1777, the United States had a unicameral Congress and a weak central government. But the Virginia Plan, as modified by the so-called Great Compromise (the Connecticut Plan) at the constitutional convention in 1787, gave the nation a bicameral Congress, with a House of Representatives elected by popular vote and a Senate elected (until 1913) by state legislatures. The two-chamber Congress was better suited to the concept of federalism, with the national government sharing powers with the states, and its adoption helped to ensure ratification of the Constitution in 1788.

Since then some states have tried to argue that their legislatures, like Congress, ought to be able to have one chamber (like the U.S. Senate) that is not subject to the Supreme Court's one person, one vote standard of equal representation. But the Court ruled in Reynolds v. Sims (1964) that both chambers of a state legislature must be apportioned on the basis of population. The Court rejected the “federal analogy” on grounds that the states are not “sovereign” and were not exempted by the Constitution from equal representation as the U.S. Senate was. (Each state has two senators, regardless of population.)

Three of the original thirteen states had unicameral legislatures, but all three converted to bicameralism: Georgia in 1789, Pennsylvania in 1790, and Vermont in 1836.

Nebraska changed to a unicameral legislature in 1934, largely at the instigation of its Republican senator, George W. Norris. Norris was also the author of the so-called Lame Duck (Twentieth) Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The Nebraska legislature has forty-nine members, called “senators,” chosen on a nonpartisan basis from districts apportioned according to population.

Several states, most recently California, have considered conversion to unicameralism. In 1996 the California Constitutional Revision Commission, after a year of hearings, recommended that the state have a single-body legislature of 121 members and a term limit of three four-year terms. The recommendations, however, were not among the propositions put before the California voters in November 1996 or June 1998. A two-thirds vote of each chamber of the state legislature was required for placement on the ballot.