State of Nebraska

Nebraska is a constituent State of the United Kingdom of America on the central Great Plains, bounded by the State of the Dakotas to the north, Iowa and Missouri across the river to the east, Kansas to the south, and Colorado and Wyoming to the west. Lincoln is the capital and Omaha the largest city. The population is approximately two million.

Three things distinguish it, and all three are unusual enough that visitors assume they have misunderstood.

It has no political parties. The Legislature is unicameral and nonpartisan: no party name appears on a polity ballot, candidates stand as individuals, and the Premier is elected directly by the whole electorate on the same terms. Nebraskans vote for parties in federal elections and for people in their own, and a great many of them will tell you unprompted which they prefer.

It owns all of its electricity. Every kilowatt generated, transmitted or sold in Nebraska belongs to a public power district, a municipal utility or a cooperative. No investor-owned utility operates anywhere in the polity, and none has for eighty years. This is the only arrangement of its kind in the Realm and it is the thing Nebraskans are proudest of after the Legislature.

And in 1879, at Omaha, a court held for the first time in the Realm’s history that a Native American is a person within the meaning of the law. The case arose because the Ponca had been removed from their homeland and Standing Bear had walked back north to bury his son. The polity’s motto, Equality Before the Law, was adopted afterwards and refers to it.

Between those three sits an ordinary plains polity of maize, cattle, railways and irrigation, drawing down an aquifer faster than it fills, and administering ninety-three counties for two million people.

History

Before the Territory

The country between the Missouri and the high plains was held by the Omaha, the Ponca, the Otoe-Missouria and the Pawnee in the east and along the rivers, and ranged by the Lakota, the Cheyenne and the Arapaho in the west. The Pawnee in particular were a large, settled, agricultural people with earth-lodge towns along the Loup and the Platte and an astronomy that organised their calendar and their village plans.

Epidemic disease preceded settlement by decades and reduced all of these peoples catastrophically before most of them had seen a settler. Smallpox and cholera moved up the rivers with the trade, and the Pawnee population fell by something over eighty per cent in the fifty years before the Territory was organised.

The Platte valley was the great road west. The overland trails to Oregon, California and the Great Basin followed the south bank for four hundred miles, and the traffic that crossed Wyoming crossed Nebraska first. Fort Kearny was built to manage it.

The Territory and admission

The Nebraska Territory was organised in 1854 and admitted as a State in 1867, the third polity admitted after the Civil War, following Nevada and West Virginia.

Settlement followed the Union Pacific, which was built west from Omaha from 1865 and made the city what it is, and the homestead legislation, whose first claim in the Realm was filed near Beatrice. The land was surveyed into squares and sold or granted into them, and the resulting geometry is visible from the air across the whole eastern half of the polity.

Settlement went badly for a great many of the people who attempted it. The eastern quarter has rainfall enough for row crops and the rest does not, and the homestead acreage was written for country that receives twice what the Sandhills receive. The abandonment rate west of the ninety-eighth meridian was very high, and the drought and depression of the 1890s emptied whole counties that have never refilled.

The Ponca removal and Standing Bear

In 1877 the Ponca, a small nation of about seven hundred people on the Niobrara in the north-east, were removed to Indian Territory. The removal was a clerical error compounded by force: their land had been included by mistake in a cession made by a different nation, and rather than correct the error the government moved the Ponca instead.

A third of them died within two years, of malaria, of exposure and of the journey. Among the dead was Standing Bear’s son, who had asked to be buried in the country he came from.

In January 1879 Standing Bear and about thirty followers left Indian Territory without permission and walked north for two months in winter, carrying the boy’s remains. They reached the Omaha reservation, were sheltered, and were arrested by Realm troops under orders to return them.

What happened next is the reason the case is taught. A journalist at Omaha publicised the arrest, two lawyers took the case without fee, and an application for habeas corpus was brought in the Crown court at Omaha. The government’s answer was not that the detention was lawful in itself. It was that the writ did not apply, because Standing Bear was not a person within the meaning of the statute.

The court held that he was.

The ruling was narrow. It did not grant citizenship, did not restore the Ponca homeland, did not disturb the removal policy in general, and was not appealed by a government that preferred a narrow loss to a wider ruling. Standing Bear went home to the Niobrara and a portion of the Ponca were eventually allowed to remain there.

Its importance is that it established a proposition the Realm’s law had until then managed to avoid stating: that the protections of the law attach to persons, and that Indigenous people are persons. Every subsequent Indigenous rights case in the Realm cites it. The polity adopted Equality Before the Law as its motto in the following decade, and Nebraska’s own account of this is careful to note that the motto commemorates a case the polity’s own settlers had largely supported the government in bringing.

The dry years

The 1890s drought and the depression that accompanied it emptied counties across the western half of the polity and produced the Populist politics for which Nebraska was known nationally for a generation. Farm mortgage foreclosure, railway freight rates and the currency question dominated Nebraska politics for twenty years, and the polity sent to New Westminster a succession of members whose principal subject was the relationship between agricultural producers and the institutions that financed and carried their crop.

That politics is the direct ancestor of both of the polity’s modern peculiarities. The cooperative habit and the suspicion of distant corporate ownership that produced public power in the 1930s were formed in the 1890s, and so was the conviction that party organisations in the eastern cities were not the natural allies of a Nebraska farmer.

The 1930s brought drought again, on ground already ploughed further west than it should have been, and the dust years removed a further tranche of the population that the 1890s had left. Nebraska’s shelterbelt planting, soil conservation districts and eventual turn to irrigation all descend from that decade.

The unicameral reform

Nebraska’s Legislature was bicameral, partisan and unremarkable until the 1930s, when it was replaced in a single step by the arrangement that now defines the polity.

The reform was carried in 1934 by referendum, against the opposition of both parties then operating in the polity, and it did two things at once. It abolished the second chamber, on the argument that a polity of this size did not need two houses and that conference committees between them were where accountability went to die. And it removed party designation from the ballot entirely, on the argument that a legislator elected by a rural county in the Sandhills had more in common with the neighbouring county’s legislator than with a party organisation in Omaha or Lincoln.

The second measure was the radical one and it was the one nobody expected to survive. It has survived for ninety-four years.

The Second Great War

Nebraska’s war was agricultural, industrial and, at Fort Robinson and elsewhere, custodial: the polity held prisoner-of-war camps, an ordnance works, air training fields whose concrete is still visible from the air, and the North Platte Canteen, where townspeople met troop trains around the clock for four years and fed several million passing servicemen out of their own rationed supplies.

The polity also participated in the Realm’s confinement of Japanese-American families, in the same way and with the same culpability recorded elsewhere in the Realm’s history. Nebraska’s own account does not separate the canteen from the camps.

The public power settlement

Between 1930 and 1946 Nebraska bought or displaced every investor-owned electric utility operating within it.

The process began with rural cooperatives serving farms the private companies had declined to reach, continued with municipal purchases of urban systems, and concluded with legislation establishing public power districts as the default form. The last privately owned utility in the polity was acquired in 1946.

The arrangement was not ideological in origin. It arose because a thinly settled polity could not obtain rural electrification on commercial terms and decided to supply it collectively, and because the same legislature that had just abolished parties was unusually willing to consider proposals on their merits. What began as a practical answer to a distribution problem became the polity’s central institution, and it is now defended by Nebraskans who agree about almost nothing else.

The century since

Nebraska’s twentieth century was agricultural consolidation, mechanisation, irrigation and depopulation, in that order and continuously.

Centre-pivot irrigation, developed and commercialised in the polity in the 1950s, transformed the sandhill and western counties by making the aquifer beneath them usable, and the circular green fields it produces are the polity’s most recognisable feature from the air. It also began the drawdown that is now the polity’s principal long-term problem.

The meatpacking industry moved out of Omaha and Sioux City to smaller towns near the feedlots from the 1960s, taking its wages down with it and bringing a workforce that is now substantially immigrant. Rural counties continued to lose people to Omaha, Lincoln and out of the polity altogether, and more than half of Nebraska’s ninety-three counties have fewer residents now than they had in 1920.

Geography

Nebraska is a rectangle with a notch, its eastern boundary the Missouri River and the rest ruled straight. It slopes continuously from about 1,650 metres in the far west to 250 metres at the Missouri, which is why the polity spans two time zones and why the rainfall halves across it.

The Platte is the defining river and is unlike most rivers. It is braided, shallow and enormously wide, running across the whole polity from the forks at North Platte to the Missouri, and the old description of it as a mile wide and an inch deep is not much of an exaggeration. It carries the road, the railway, the fibre and the irrigation, and its central reach is one of the most important migratory bird stopovers on the continent: half a million sandhill cranes stage on it every spring, in an event that brings more visitors to central Nebraska than anything else does.

The Sandhills cover about a quarter of the polity in the north-centre and are the largest stabilised dune field in the western hemisphere: grass-covered, rolling, almost entirely unploughed, and used for cattle because they cannot safely be used for anything else. Breaking the sod there causes blowouts that do not heal, and Nebraska’s ranchers understand this better than most conservation authorities do.

Beneath most of the polity lies the Ogallala Aquifer, and Nebraska holds by far the largest share of it of any polity. It is the reason the western half is farmed at all.

The climate is continental and extreme: hot summers, cold winters, violent spring weather, and a tornado season that is genuinely dangerous. Blizzards close the interstate. The polity’s emergency management is practised and well regarded.

Constitutional system

Nebraska’s constitution is the most unusual of any polity in the Realm, and it is unusual by deliberate design rather than by accident of history.

The Crown and the Governor

The Crown is represented by a Governor, appointed on advice and non-partisan by convention, who gives assent, exercises the reserve powers and performs the ceremonial functions of the office. The incumbent is Ruth Sorensen.

The office is more consequential here than in most polities for a reason peculiar to Nebraska. In a polity without parties there is no leader of the opposition, no shadow ministry and no organised alternative government, so the Governor’s conventional role as the constitutional adviser of last resort is exercised in a vacuum that elsewhere is filled by party structures. Governors of Nebraska are expected to know the Legislature personally in a way that would be improper anywhere else.

The Premier

The Premier is elected directly by the whole electorate, without party designation, for a four-year term, and is not a member of the Legislature.

This is the polity’s answer to the problem its own reform created. A chamber without parties cannot produce a government in the ordinary parliamentary way, because there is no majority bloc to command and nothing for a confidence vote to be a vote of. Nebraska resolved this in 1934 by separating the executive from the chamber entirely: the Premier is chosen by the people rather than by the Legislature, and the Legislature cannot remove them.

The incumbent is Emil Kovar, elected in 2026.

The Premier appoints the executive, directs the administration, proposes the budget and may veto legislation. The Legislature may override by a three-fifths vote, and does so with some regularity, since a chamber of individuals has no partisan reason to protect an executive it did not choose.

The Legislature

The Legislature is unicameral, has forty-nine members, and its members are called Senators, which is a survival from the bicameral period that nobody has troubled to correct.

Elections are nonpartisan. No party name appears on the ballot, candidates are listed alphabetically, and party affiliation, where a candidate has one, is a private fact of the same order as their church. Terms are four years, staggered.

The chamber has no leader of the government and no leader of the opposition. It elects a Speaker to preside and distributes committee chairmanships by secret ballot of the whole house, which produces chairs who have the confidence of the chamber rather than of a party manager. Legislation is introduced by individual Senators, considered in committee, and debated at length: Nebraska’s filibuster is real, is used, and is broken by a two-thirds vote.

The result is a legislature that moves slowly, produces bills with unpredictable coalitions behind them, and is very difficult to whip because there is nobody whose job it is to whip. Nebraskans regard this as the point.

What replaces the parties

Something always does, and in Nebraska it is organised interests rather than organised parties.

The public power districts, the farm organisations, the cooperatives, the county associations, the packers, the railways, the insurers and the university all maintain standing relationships with individual Senators and supply the coordination that a party would otherwise provide. A Nebraska Senator’s voting record is generally predictable from their county and their committee, and rarely from anything resembling an ideology.

Critics of the system make the obvious point: that removing parties does not remove organisation, it merely removes the organisation that is publicly accountable and leaves the rest. A voter can hold a party responsible at an election and cannot hold a farm bureau responsible at anything. Defenders answer that the interests were always there, that a party would represent them just as faithfully while pretending to represent something else, and that Nebraska has simply stopped pretending.

Neither side has persuaded the other in ninety-four years and the arrangement has never been seriously threatened at a referendum.

Nebraska in the federation

Nebraska sends three members to the Commons at New Westminster, and they stand for parties, because federal elections are federal.

The result is that a Nebraskan votes on party lines for one chamber and on personal lines for another, frequently on the same day, and the polity has become an object of study for exactly that reason. What the studies mostly find is that Nebraskans distinguish the two without difficulty and hold contradictory opinions about which is better with no apparent discomfort.

Counties and local government

There are ninety-three counties, which is a great many for two million people and is the residue of a nineteenth-century settlement pattern in which a county seat had to be within a day’s wagon journey.

More than half have fewer residents now than in 1920. Arthur County has under five hundred people. County consolidation is proposed periodically, is studied, and fails, because a county seat is generally the only thing keeping a small town alive and the counties that would be abolished are the ones voting.

Counties run roads, sheriffs, assessment, courts of first instance, elections and much of public health. Below them sit school districts, natural resources districts, and the public power districts, all separately elected.

The natural resources districts are worth separate mention. Nebraska is divided into twenty-three of them, drawn on river basins rather than county lines, and they hold real authority over groundwater allocation, well permitting, flood control and soil conservation. They were created in 1972 by merging several hundred single-purpose districts, they are elected, and they are the polity’s principal instrument for managing the aquifer. No other polity in the Realm has anything quite like them.

Law and the courts

Nebraska’s judiciary is headed by the Supreme Court of Nebraska at Lincoln, above a Court of Appeals, district courts in twelve judicial districts, and county courts of first instance.

Judges are appointed by the Governor from lists prepared by nominating commissions and stand at periodic retention votes, which in a polity without parties are conducted without the party cues that inform such votes elsewhere. Retention votes in Nebraska are consequently decided on very little information, and the polity’s bar associations publish evaluations principally to fill that gap.

The court’s docket is disproportionately water, land, agricultural and administrative, and it is the ultimate authority on the natural resources districts’ allocation decisions, which makes it a more significant institution in the polity’s daily economy than a general court usually is.

The Ponca habeas case of 1879 was decided by a Crown court sitting at Omaha rather than by the polity’s own judiciary, since the detention was by Realm troops under Realm orders. Nebraska nonetheless treats it as its own, teaches it in schools as its own, and took its motto from it, which the polity’s legal historians note is a claim to an inheritance the polity did not earn.

Public power

Every kilowatt generated, transmitted or sold in Nebraska is publicly owned, and the polity is the only one in the Realm of which that is true.

Supply is provided by public power districts, which are elected political subdivisions with their own boards and their own territories; by municipal utilities in the larger cities; and by rural cooperatives owned by their members. There is no investor-owned utility, no shareholder, and no dividend. Surpluses are returned as lower rates or reinvested.

The practical consequences are visible and are the reason the arrangement survives. Rates are among the lowest in the Realm. Rural service reaches everywhere, including places no commercial supplier would have gone. Boards are elected and their meetings are attended. And the polity’s very large wind build-out was carried out by public entities, which meant the revenue stayed inside the counties hosting the turbines rather than leaving with a developer.

The criticisms are equally real and are made inside Nebraska rather than outside it. Elected boards with technical responsibilities can be captured by low-turnout constituencies. A monopoly is a monopoly whoever owns it, and a customer with a complaint has a ballot rather than a competitor. Public districts have been slower than some private utilities elsewhere to retire coal generation, because the plants are locally owned, locally staffed and locally mourned. And the absence of external capital has made large investments slower to finance.

Nebraskans debate all of this continuously and no proposal to permit investor-owned utilities has been put to the Legislature in fifty years, because no Senator has been willing to introduce one.

Economy

Nebraska’s economy is agriculture and what agriculture requires, plus a financial centre nobody expected.

Row crops

Maize and soybeans dominate, grown on some of the most productive land in the world in the east and on irrigated ground further west. Nebraska is among the largest maize producers in the Realm, and the great majority of that crop is not eaten by people: it becomes cattle feed and ethanol.

Irrigation is the difference between the two halves of the polity, and centre-pivot irrigation was developed here. Nebraska has more irrigated acreage than any other polity, drawing on the aquifer beneath it.

Cattle and meatpacking

Nebraska feeds and slaughters cattle in enormous numbers. The Sandhills carry the cow-calf herds on grass that cannot be ploughed; the feedlots of the central and eastern counties finish them; and the packing plants process them.

The packing industry is the polity’s largest single private employer and the source of its hardest labour question. The plants moved from the cities to the small towns from the 1960s, wages fell with the move, unionisation weakened, and the workforce is now substantially immigrant and refugee: Latin American, east African, Karen and Yazidi communities are established in towns that were homogeneous within living memory. The work is dangerous, the injury rates are high, and the industry’s line speeds are a standing subject before the Legislature.

Nebraska’s own account of this is comparatively honest. The towns concerned would have continued emptying without the plants, the plants would not operate without the workers, and the polity’s schools and clinics have adapted more readily than its politics has.

Omaha

Omaha is a financial and insurance centre out of all proportion to its size, and has been since the nineteenth century, when it was where the cattle money and the railway money met.

It holds a very large insurance and reinsurance industry, substantial asset management, telecommunications and payments processing, and the headquarters of the Union Pacific, which has run west from the city since 1865 and remains among the largest freight railways in the Realm.

Wind and ethanol

Nebraska’s wind resource is large and its build-out has been rapid, publicly owned, and concentrated in the same counties losing population, which has made it unusually popular: the turbines pay county taxes and the revenue stays.

Ethanol consumes a substantial share of the maize crop, employs several thousand people in small towns, and is politically untouchable across the whole polity, which is the ordinary condition of ethanol wherever maize is grown.

The aquifer

The Ogallala underlies most of Nebraska and the polity holds the largest share of it of any jurisdiction. It is being drawn down faster than it recharges, and it is a fossil resource: what recharge there is measures in millimetres a year against extraction measured in centimetres.

Nebraska’s position is better than that of the polities to the south, where the saturated thickness is thinner and depletion is further advanced, and it is not good. Declines are severe in the south-west, moderate across the centre and negligible in the sandhill counties, where the aquifer is thickest and the sand transmits recharge best.

The natural resources districts are the management instrument, and they have real power: allocation limits, metering, well moratoria, and in several districts a hard cap on acre-inches per irrigated acre. The system is genuinely more effective than the alternatives elsewhere and is not sufficient.

The polity’s difficulty is that the aquifer is the reason the western half is populated, that irrigation is the difference between a viable farm and an abandoned one, and that no allocation regime anybody has proposed reduces extraction to the recharge rate without ending irrigated agriculture in a large part of Nebraska. The districts have therefore been managing the rate of decline rather than stopping it, and they say so publicly, which is more than most such bodies do.

This is the polity’s principal long-term problem and it is not a crisis. It is a slope.

Transport

Nebraska is a corridor and has been since before it was a polity. The overland trails, the Union Pacific, the interstate and the fibre all follow the Platte valley west, in a band a few miles wide carrying almost everything that crosses the continent by land.

Rail is the polity’s oldest industry and remains among its largest. The Union Pacific has run west from Omaha since 1865, is headquartered there, and operates the classification yard at North Platte, which is the largest in the world and sorts a very substantial share of the Realm’s westbound freight.

The interstate follows the Platte and carries heavy through traffic. Away from it, Nebraska’s road network is a grid of county roads laid on the survey squares, much of it unpaved, and the polity maintains more miles of road per resident than almost any other.

Air service is thin outside Omaha and Lincoln and is subsidised on most routes.

Cities and population

Omaha holds about half a million people, is the polity’s commercial, medical and cultural centre, and is more varied than its reputation: it has the Realm’s largest Sudanese community, long-established Black neighbourhoods with their own history in the packing industry and in the civil rights period, and Czech, German, Irish and Italian descent in large numbers.

Lincoln is the capital and the university city, and is the polity’s fastest-growing community. Grand Island, Kearney, Hastings, Norfolk, Columbus and Fremont are the regional towns that hold the centre together, several of them meatpacking towns with the demographics that implies. North Platte holds the largest railway classification yard in the world.

Everything west of Grand Island is thinly settled and getting thinner. Half of Nebraska’s population lives in two counties, and the other half is spread across ninety-one.

Welfare, health and education

The Realm’s guarantees apply and the National Health Service of America delivers through polity structures, which in Nebraska means substantial hospitals at Omaha and Lincoln, critical-access facilities across the rural counties, and the long-distance problems familiar from every thinly settled polity.

The University of Nebraska at Lincoln is the polity’s principal institution and is unusual in the depth of its agricultural research, its extension service and its veterinary and food science programmes, which serve the industries the polity actually has. John J. Pershing taught military subjects there from 1891 to 1895 and took his law degree in 1893, which the university mentions frequently.

Schooling is well regarded and expensive to deliver, for the usual reason: a polity with ninety-three counties and two million people runs a great many small schools, and consolidating them closes towns.

Society and culture

Nebraska is agricultural, Protestant and Catholic in roughly equal measure, Germanic and Scandinavian and Czech by descent, and possessed of a civic culture that is unusually participatory for a conservative place.

That participation is the thread. A polity with ninety-three counties, twenty-three natural resources districts, dozens of public power boards and a legislature without parties asks a great deal of ordinary people, and a surprising number of them serve on something. Nebraskans are more likely to have held elected office than the residents of any other polity, which is arithmetic as much as virtue: there are a great many offices and not many people.

College football occupies a place in the polity’s life that outsiders find difficult to credit, and the stadium at Lincoln becomes the third-largest population centre in Nebraska on a home Saturday.

Arbor Day was founded in Nebraska in 1872 and is observed as a polity holiday. The crane migration on the Platte in March brings visitors from across the Realm. The Czech towns of the south-east keep their festivals, and the newer communities of the packing towns have begun to add theirs.

Political tensions

The aquifer is the largest, and it is a slope rather than a cliff, which makes it politically difficult in a way that a crisis would not be.

The packing towns carry the polity’s sharpest social question: an industry that keeps small towns alive, on wages and conditions that a polity with a functioning labour politics would have improved by now, staffed by people whose presence is welcomed by the schools and resented by a minority.

Rural depopulation is continuous and no policy has arrested it.

And the nonpartisan settlement itself is questioned more now than at any time since 1934. National party organisations have found ways to support individual candidates without appearing on the ballot, spending in Legislature races has risen sharply, and Nebraskans who follow the chamber closely report that it divides along recognisably partisan lines more often than it used to. Defenders say this proves the design is working, since the parties have had to come in disguised and can be thrown out the same way. Critics say a disguise is what a party wears when the rules are the only thing stopping it.

Nobody proposes returning to a partisan ballot. Whether the system is still doing what it was built to do is genuinely disputed.

Assessment

Nebraska is a conservative polity that has made two of the most radical constitutional decisions in the Realm and shows no interest in reversing either.

The thread connecting them is not ideology. It is a settled preference for arrangements that can be inspected. A legislature without parties is one whose members can be examined individually. A utility owned by an elected district is one whose accounts are public and whose board can be attended. Both decisions came out of a period when Nebraskans concluded that distant organisations, whether party machines or holding companies, were making decisions about Nebraska that Nebraskans could not see.

The cost of that preference is the one its critics identify accurately. Inspectability is not the same as accountability. A voter can examine forty-nine Senators individually and still have no way to hold anyone responsible for the direction of a government, and a public power board that nobody attends is no more answerable than a private one. The polity has removed the institutions that organise politics without removing the interests that politics organises around, and what fills the space is less visible than what it replaced.

The polity’s future turns on water it is spending faster than it receives, on towns that have been emptying for a century, and on an industry that keeps some of those towns alive on terms it would rather not examine closely. None of those is a crisis, and all three are slopes.

Chronology

Symbols

The flag is divided horizontally, blue above and gold below, separated by three narrow white bands in a braided wave, in the proportion 2:3.

The blue is the sky, the gold the prairie and the maize, and the three white channels are the Platte, which braids across the whole polity and which every part of Nebraska has some relationship with. The design replaced a flag consisting of the polity seal on a plain field, which was widely disliked and, in a survey of the Realm’s flags conducted in the 1990s, finished last.

The motto is Equality Before the Law, adopted in the 1880s and referring to the Ponca habeas case at Omaha.

Arbor Day, in April, is a polity holiday. Statehood Day is 1 March.

Trivia

See also

• The State of Wyoming, upstream on the Platte and the North Platte, and a litigant against Nebraska in the water compacts
• The State of the Dakotas, to the north
• The Free State of Colorado, upstream and bound by compact
• Gerald Ford, born at Omaha in 1913
• John J. Pershing, who taught at the University of Nebraska
• Elections and constituencies, for Nebraska’s three Commons seats
• The United Kingdom of America, the Realm

Nebraska · State · Great Plains · Polities · Public Power · Unresolved Questions