Two years ago Sara Gideon, the Democratic speaker of the Maine House of Representatives, announced that she was sick and tired of the partisan rancor permeating her state’s government. So she ripped up the seating chart in the 151-member chamber, the one where Republicans and Democrats traditionally glare at each other from across the room, and mixed up the two parties.

Neither party was happy about the plan.

“Virtually every comment I received from people about why they didn’t want to sit in a combined seating arrangement — ‘I want to be comfortable about who I’m sitting next to,’ ‘I want to trust the person sitting next to me,’ ‘I want to feel I can be myself’ — made me realize that this was the only way forward,” Ms. Gideon said in an interview.

State Republicans still grumble that the move isolated them from one another and represented little more than window dressing from a politician who, they say, is partisan when it suits her. But Ms. Gideon, 47, says it brought a new comity to the Statehouse, and her Democratic colleagues now say that it helped foster unexpected cross-party cooperation on tricky pieces of legislation.

“It was incredibly meaningful, because you get to know your seatmates very, very well,” said Heather Sanborn, a state senator who served a term in the House with Ms. Gideon as speaker.

Source: New York Times

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