RALEIGH – It won’t work.

I guarantee you that is what some longtime lawmakers and allies of soon-to-be-ex-Speaker of the House Jim Black are saying about proposed reforms of the legislative process. The Democratic nomination of Rep. Joe Hackney to be the next speaker has prompted new attention to proposed changes, most of them championed in the past by a broad range of folks including the N.C. Coalition for Lobbying and Government Reform, Republican Rep. John Blust of Greensboro, and Hackney himself.

Reform won’t “work,” say its critics, because allowing a full, fair, and open debate interferes with the passage of legislation. If leaders don’t have the ability to stack key committees with temporary members to push bills to the floor, to limit amendments once they’re there, and to use blank bills to keep some agenda items secret until the waning days of the session, the result will be chaos and inaction.

Perhaps. Properly run legislatures look like that sometimes. To believe otherwise is to misunderstand the fundamental purpose of elected legislatures. They are not charged with the task of passing as much and as far-reaching legislation as possible. Rather, the fundamental purpose of representative government is to communicate and debate the various and conflicting views of the general population. It is to represent constituents. The outcome may be legislation. But it can also be a praiseworthy outcome when no legislation results. Such an outcome can signify that advocates of a particular policy lack a strong enough consensus to legislate, at least for the moment.

The United States Constitution was famously devoted to the proposition that the exercise of government power, being dangerous, needed to be restrained by a combination of delegated powers, checks and balances among governmental departments, and a list of rights that can be abridged rarely if ever by even majoritarian government. The framers of the original constitution and the later Bill of Rights didn’t just dream up this notion one day at the dinner table. Their own state governments had increasingly come to include separation of powers, declarations of rights, and other elements designed to keep one individual or faction from wielding unchecked and overweening authority. They applied what they had already learned to the construction of a federal government.

These lessons have, of course, been frequently forgotten by subsequent generations of politicians, pundits, and activists. Exercising governmental power – which is, remember, nothing more or less than the institutional use of violence or threat of violence to accomplish an end – can be immensely rewarding and addictive. The crass get used to government as a means of enriching themselves, their cronies, or their particular constituencies at the expense of the general public. And the credulous come to believe that action is the same thing as progress.

I’m not arguing that inaction is necessarily beneficial, either. Government does have a legitimate role in addressing public problems. A legislature that respects and airs the views of all its members, not just those in the current majority, is more likely to choose the right tasks to perform and fashion efficient means of performing them. A clash of governing philosophies may be messy and time-consuming. But it, well, works better – if you define “work” correctly.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.