Legislative Duty

By Airick Leonard West The Kansas City Post In our society, citizens are expected to participate through being drafted to serve in time-consuming assignments that include listening to expert testimony, drawing specific conclusions on the information they are presented with, and making a consensual decision. This process happens every day in every state and thousands of people participate. We cherish this responsibility because these deliberations are binding and have significant impacts on the individuals who stand before this gathering of peers. We call this radical aspect of our judicial system, 'jury duty.' But this process can also work if applied to our legislative system. Particularly in light of the new team at city hall, kansas city is ready for, 'legislative duty.' Today, citizen involvement in the legislative system is voluntary and usually not at all systematic. Instead, when city council looks for citizen involvement, it frequently forms a task force of appointed individuals or commissions an independent study that includes focus groups and questionnaires. While these forms of citizen involvement have worked well for some tasks, there are a few noteworthy shortcomings. Chiefly, the citizen input in this capacity is neither binding nor influential (and while voting is a binding form of participation, there is no other direct method of binding citizen involvement in the legislative process). Task forces tend to allow for in-depth evaluation of issues, but rarely have proportional representation since they are typically appointed positions. and while a commissioned study may evaluate a proportional and representational subset of the population, they don't commonly allow for the depth of citizen engagement that a task force might. And neither of these approaches necessarily employ a consensus model of deliberation. 'Legislative Duty' is the middle ground between these two common approaches. In this model, a citizen task force is commissioned of randomly selected citizens from within the legal jurisdictional boundaries. These citizens are summoned in the same manner as citizens would be for jury duty. Once an appropriate body has been convened, the task force is presented with an issue that has been previously agreed upon by city council. The body is briefed on its duty and the expected outcomes of the task force after which it is presented with information and experts representing multiple perspectives and disciplines. Once the body has heard evidence, it is allowed to deliberate utilizing an experienced facilitator trained in facilitating towards consensus. This is not unlike a jury deliberation where the consensus process requires a rigorous parsing of the information and a judgment of the merits. Citizen engagement in the local legislative process is an untapped potential of our city -- the mayor's decision to open nominations for boards and commissions to the public is a valuable first step. Taking this philosophy a step further, legislative duty is a direct, deliberative, consensus-based citizen participation technique that will challenge our conventional notions of authentic citizen participation. Ideally, concepts such as this will reinvigorate our democracy and will remind the citizenry that voting is only intended to be the most basic form of civic duty, not the end of our collective responsibility.