By Chuck McCutcheon
Correspondent, CSMonitor

(AXcess News) Washington - Jack Hatch shook his head in frustration as he prepared to wade into yet another partisan brawl over healthcare. The Democratic Iowa state senator was co-chairing a 2007 special commission hearing on the subject in Mason City, and his GOP colleagues were carping about how an overly bureaucratic "Hillarycare"-style plan would be proposed for their state.

Senator Hatch was winding up to launch his own rebuttal, but before he took the bait, he noticed that Julie Kuhle, a respected pharmacist on the commission, wanted to speak, and he deferred to her.

That move, he says, made the difference between gridlock and the momentum that has put the state in the forefront of healthcare reform. The pitch of the group had tilted more toward partisan Washington Beltway politics than the small-town pragmatism Iowan lawmakers pride themselves on, and Ms. Kuhle was about to shame them for it.

"Is this the way senators talk to each other?" she asked exasperatedly. "I can't believe it! We're not here to talk about politics - we're here to talk about the problem of healthcare!"

The outburst, recalls Kuhle with obvious satisfaction, "just kind of shut people up." They started to listen.

That, she and others say, is what the smaller arena of statehouse politics allows - more listening and, as a result, more action. Indeed, agrees Hatch, "that was the defining moment. At that point it opened the floodgates, and all the stakeholders started to talk seriously."

The eventual result, which both sides say was crafted through an open subcommittee process, has been the passage over the past two years of bipartisan legislation that makes the Hawkeye State one of the nation's healthcare leaders: Nearly 100 percent of all children in the state now have healthcare coverage and prescription drug costs have been reined in while providing more coverage options for businesses and families.

State officials from both parties say such gridlock breakthrough enables them to outstrip their counterparts in Congress in getting things done. They say their achievements can teach Washington, D.C., a few things about bipartisanship and, in the process, potentially help defuse the voter anger enveloping the nation.

The Democrat-versus-Republican skirmishing that holds up major federal legislation is less of an obstacle in statehouses, clearing a path for innovative bills on issues that have immediate and direct effects on constituents' lives. The result is that state lawmakers are shaping the legislative landscape of American life more than at any time in the past half century, say political observers. And they'd probably have even more clout if they weren't in such dire economic straits.

States often are described as legislative "laboratories of innovation." Their willingness to experiment and cooperate, say experts, has become especially critical as the country seeks a way out of the economic crisis and as the public mood toward government has soured.

"It used to be that the US could weather every storm because we had the money," says Richard Nathan, former director of the State University of New York's Rockefeller Institute of Government and author of several books on federalism. "Now, government has to get smarter and that's the big challenge. So I think personally that what [Congress] should try to do with legislation should involve the states - they've been responsible for doing what gets done in the domestic sector."

That isn't to say states are immune from gridlock. Recent fiscal fights in California between legislators and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger have left many wondering if that state is governable. And in the continued partisan warfare in New York, the two party caucuses in the state Senate refused last year to even meet in the same space for a month.

But states also have shown a greater willingness to put aside differences and tackle topics that in the past would have been seen as the province of the federal government. One example is immigration: In 2009, 10 states enacted tougher penalties for human smuggling and involuntary servitude, and provided aid to victims of those immigration-related crimes.

"Unfortunately, the states have led where Congress has fallen down on the job," says Tom Hucker, a Democratic member of Maryland's House of Delegates who worked to pass the nation's first statewide living-wage law in 2007. "Many of us had hoped this would be a much more activist Congress, but we know how long it takes to get things done, and when they do get done, it's often watered down. So that means there's more opportunity for us."

To take that opportunity requires conscious tactical decisions. With Iowa's healthcare legislation, Republicans say that meant opting not to be obstructionist, given the issue's importance. They said it made more practical sense to work with Democrats rather than repeatedly accuse them of seeking a massive government-run program.

"We said this is something we should not fight about and is something we should move forward on," says Republican Kraig Paulsen, Iowa's House minority leader. It was easy to win strong bipartisan support, he says, because the work in the House's subcommittees was transparent and inclusive; because all sides had input, the resulting ideas "flat made a whole lot of sense.” That stands in contrast to Congress, where Republicans in the minority accuse Democrats and the Obama administration of shutting them out of negotiations.

Representative Paulsen says some inherently institutional features at the state level encourage bipartisanship. Unlike most legislative bodies that segregate the parties on each side of the chamber, Hawkeye State members are intermingled, enabling them to converse with a range of colleagues during floor debates. "To the right I have a Republican and to the left I have a Democrat, and in front of me there's a Democrat," Paulsen says. "It provides some casual opportunities for collaboration."

It also helps that minority parties in Iowa and other states - unlike Congress - can't rely on the filibuster. The US Senate, these days, only has to threaten that parliamentary weapon to stall a vote if there are fewer than 60 votes to pass legislation. But in the few states where the filibuster is permitted, state lawmakers can only use it the old-fashioned way, by talking endlessly to stall business.

Also state lawmakers often say they keenly recognize the value of collaborating with someone whose politics diverge from theirs.

Texas Democratic state Sen. Leticia Van de Putte, a blunt-talking Latina, likes to recount her success in 2001 in enlisting help from an unlikely ally, the late Teel Bivins, who was a candid, conservative Amarillo rancher. She knew she needed Republican help for her 2001 bill to allow Texas-born children of illegal immigrants to qualify for in-state college tuition and financial aid - an unpopular idea with the GOP.

She says she told Senator Bivins that the government already had paid to educate the students in public schools and that it made no sense to punish them; he asked for some restrictions to mollify his colleagues and eventually agreed to push the DREAM Act into law in 2001.

"People looked at us and said, 'If I have a conservative rural Republican and a big-city lady Democrat who can come to a middle ground, it must be good policy,' " recounts Senator Van de Putte, who co-chaired the 2008 Democratic National Convention.

In Washington State, House Democrats in the majority often turn to Republican Mike Armstrong on government reform issues. They recently noticed Representative Armstrong had introduced a bill to overhaul the state's Department of Social and Health Services and decided to use it as a way to showcase their interest in improving how the bureaucracy functions. The Ways and Means Committee passed the bill in early February, 15 to 7.

"We decided we're here to really show reform and we really want to cut the costs of government, so we grabbed Mike's bill," says Democratic state Rep. Larry Seaquist. "It's still his bill, but now we've cooperated on it."

If Congress wants the same results, Representative Seaquist says, it should look to his state. Unlike Capitol Hill, where committees have separate Democratic and Republican staffs, every panel in Olympia has a single nonpartisan staff. Ethics rules also are stringent, with campaign contributions forbidden starting 30 days before each legislative session.

"We still have our knock-down, drag-out fights, like on how we approach taxes," he says. "But this economic situation is so bad - and voters are so angry and sick and tired of partisan politics - that we've been working together on substantive things."

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