Bills, bills -- the 'greatest scourge'

The late U.S. Sen. Sam Ervin liked to tell a story about some advice he got when he first went into politics, “Don’t pass any new bills,” one person told him, “and repeal about half the ones on the books.”
They could use Sam Ervin in Raleigh today, where the 170 members of the state House and Senate have filed 4,962 bills and still counting - the largest since the all-time record of 5,627 in 1913, according to the Web site maintained by Gerry Cohen, head of bill drafting at the General Assembly. Click here.
Ervin started his career in the state legislature, long before he became famous in the U.S. Senate for taking on Joe McCarthy in the 1950s and later Richard Nixon in the 1970s. (Ervin even served briefly in the U.S. House, where he served out the unexpired portion of a term in the seat held by his brother Joe, a congressman who committed suicide in late 1945.)
Ervin first served in the N.C. General Assembly in the House sessions of 1923, 1925 and 1931. Ervin’s first session, there were 4,267 bills filed; in his third session in 1931, the number had dwindled to 2,155.
Cohen’s Web site notes that the number of bills got out of hand in 1911 and Gov. W.W. Kitchin sent a message that “Special legislation is the greatest scourge of government.”
Even more bills were filed in 1913, and in 1915 the legislature approved a constitutional amendment to reduce the number of bills. The public rejected it, but a later attempt succeeded and the number of bills began to drop. The lowest number, Cohen reports, was 1,223 in 1943. (When I first came to Raleigh for the Greensboro Daily News in 1977, the number of bills was 2,726.)
That’s a lot of paper.
For political trivia lovers, Cohen’s Web site also has information about how many of those bills pass. Last year, the rate was 17 percent, a little higher than the 16 percent for the 2005 session. Four decades ago, the rate was lots higher - 72 percent in the 1965 session.