Nebraska

Nebraska has a conventional plural executive of six statewide elected officials: the Governor, the Lieutenant Governor, the Secretary of State, the Attorney General, the State Treasurer, and the State Auditor. Since 1974 the Governor and Lieutenant Governor have run together as a single ticket and so share a party; the other four are elected independently and can come from a different party.

The Governor appoints the heads of the executive agencies that aren’t separately elected and leads the rest of the bureaucracy. By national standards Nebraska’s executive branch is unremarkable, the state’s distinctiveness lies almost entirely in its legislature.

This is what sets Nebraska apart from all 49 other states. Nebraska has a unicameral legislature, a single chamber, rather than the usual two-house, House-and-Senate design. Its 49 members are confusingly titled "senators" even though there is no separate house of representatives, and the body is universally known as the "Unicameral." Members serve four-year terms and are limited to two consecutive terms (eight years).

It is also the only officially nonpartisan state legislature in the country: candidates run and serve with no party labels on the ballot or in the chamber’s formal organization, there are no party caucuses controlling committees in the usual sense, and seniority and coalition-building matter more than party line. Pay is very low, $12,000 a year ($1,000 a month), a figure fixed in the state constitution since 1988, plus a session per diem, so members are citizen-legislators. The Unicameral was the brainchild of U.S. Senator George Norris, who argued a single nonpartisan house would be cheaper, more transparent, and harder for special interests to manipulate; Nebraska voters adopted it by ballot initiative in 1934 and it has operated this way ever since.

With only one chamber, Nebraska’s lawmaking is genuinely different. A bill is introduced, gets a public committee hearing (the Unicameral guarantees every bill a hearing, an unusual openness), and then moves through three rounds of floor debate and votes in the single chamber. Because there is no second house, there is no conference committee and no chance for one chamber to check the other, the only institutional brakes are the bill’s own multi-stage process, the committee system, and the Governor’s veto.

The Governor can sign a bill, veto it, or use a line-item veto on appropriations. An override takes three-fifths of the members, 30 of the 49, rather than the two-thirds many states require. Nebraska also has strong direct democracy: citizens can enact statutes and constitutional amendments by initiative and overturn laws by referendum, the same tools that voters used to create the Unicameral itself.

The Governor appoints the heads of the non-elected agencies, proposes the budget, can call special sessions, holds emergency powers, wields a line-item veto, and holds the clemency power (exercised through a Board of Pardons made up of the Governor, the Secretary of State, and the Attorney General). The veto matters more here than in many states precisely because there is no second legislative chamber to filter bills, the Governor is the main counterweight to the single house.

The other checks are the independently elected Attorney General, Secretary of State, Treasurer, and Auditor, the three-fifths override, and the voters’ initiative power. But the defining feature of Nebraska government is structural: a single, nonpartisan legislative chamber facing a single governor.

Nebraska uses merit selection plus retention. The Governor appoints judges from a nominating commission’s list, and the judges then face periodic up-or-down retention votes rather than contested elections. The Nebraska Supreme Court sits at the top, above the Court of Appeals and the trial-level District and County courts. The merit-and-retention model keeps judicial selection out of partisan campaigns, fitting for a state whose legislature is itself nonpartisan.