Enter the new breed.

• Author: Boulard, Garry
• Position: NCSL: The First 25 Years - State legislators

Every legislature has always had them. Newcomers with special agendas, who buck the process, irritate the leadership and stir up the members. But technology, term limits and a shrinking world may be giving rise to a different kind of "newcomer"and more of them.

There was a time when new members came to the legislature, were assigned seats in the back row and made to understand that for a couple of years they should keep quiet and watch.

But times have changed. Term limits in 18 states, growing Republican numbers in the South, complicated issues brought about by international agreements and the wonders of the information age have Maine given rise to a different kind of "newcomer" in the legislature.

Kathleen A. Stevens is a perfect example.

Elected to the Maine House of Representatives when she was only 22 years old, she's never made much more than $15,000 a year, recently received a master's in English and American literature (fellow lawmaker Tom Davidson jokes that Stevens never reads anything unless is it more than 100 years old) and is perfectly comfortable challenging the powers that be and the way things traditionally have been done.

And because of Maine's term limits, Stevens, who is now 27 and the ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee, is at the end of her career in the House.

She is what might be described as a "new breed" of legislator: unconnected to any party machinery, untraditional and uncommonly candid for an elected official.

Right now Stevens is being particularly candid about term limits in Maine, a law that ironically has helped propel her to greater positions of power simply because the senior members before her were forced to abandon ship.

"Term limits are an imposition on democracy," Stevens says simply. But what really riles her is the loss of institutional memory.

And this is not a new complaint, even among the new breed.

According to futurist Ed Barlow, a strategic planning consultant who is on the graduate school faculty at the University of San Francisco, state legislatures across the land are increasingly caught up in a subtle interplay between the new kind of lawmaker and the term limits trend, which has both spurred and then suddenly halted their public careers.

"The biggest complaint against term limits, even on the part of new legislators, is that history walks out the door when term-limited members have to leave," Barlow says. "These are the people who know where the bones are buried, how government works, why things have been done the way they are."

For Stevens, term limits mean she had to recently fight to get a measure she sponsored - it would make animal abuse a felony - sent to the right committee. Even though the clerk of the House and the secretary of the Senate recommended the measure be sent to the criminal justice committee, the bill analysis pegged it for the House's agriculture committee. In Maine, the full House and Senate make...