Do we really need an overhaul of Legislature?
Remember Y2K and all the scams people were selling to protect you from the millennium bug? That same logic of a solution in search of a problem is alive and well with the proponents of a part-time Legislature initiative.
What exactly is the problem that a part-time Legislature will solve? According to Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Poizner, the problem is "career politicians" in Sacramento.
But hasn't Poizner ever heard of term limits? California has the toughest term-limit law in the entire United States. Of the 80 members of the state Assembly, 27 haven't been in office for even a full year and another 32 are only in their third year. In fact, only three of 80 have more than five years' experience. Oakland Raider coaches have longer careers than legislators.
Some say a part-time Legislature would eliminate budget impasses and guarantee on-time budgets. Not if history is any indicator. Between 1958 and 1966, in the middle of the so-called good old days of a part-time Legislature, that body failed to pass an on-time budget 80 percent of the time.
Many of the reasons that forced budget delays 60 years ago are still with us today: how to provide and pay for services Californians demand. The big difference then was the political middle ground was far bigger. There were conservative Democrats like Bakersfield's Walter Stiern and Fresno's Hugh Burns, and liberal Republicans like San Francisco's Don Grunsky of Santa Cruz, all of whom were willing to put aside party loyalty and ideological purity for the good of California.
Who was responsible for last year's budget delay? Democrats who repeatedly voted for a budget? Or the 15 Senate Republicans who refused to provide the necessary two-thirds vote for weeks? If voters want an on-time budget, then they should bring the state in line with every other state except Arkansas and Rhode Island, and allow the Legislature to adopt a budget with a simple majority.
(By the way, both Nevada and Arizona have part-time legislatures and thus year faced budget deficits worse than California's.)
The Republican Party activists behind the part-time Legislature initiative claim that a part-time body would be free of special interest control. California has its problems, but political corruption isn't one.
Believe it or not, two recent studies ranked the California as having one of the cleanest political systems in the country. This wasn't the case in the 1940s and 1950s when the part-time Legislature was constantly beset with real bribery and vote-buying.
The real question of responsiveness strikes at what clearly is the real motive behind the part-time Legislature movement. Like spoiled kids who want to change the rules of the game, the Republicans want to cripple the most representative branch of state government simply because they can't win elections far and square.
Spare me the wails of gerrymandered districts. In the 1970s and 1990s legislative districts were drawn by the Supreme Court and heralded by the GOP as fair. At the end of both decades the Republicans elected fewer members than they had under the so-called Democratic gerrymanders. If the GOP truly represented the majority will of Californians, why have their candidates lost 67 percent of all statewide races since 1958? Why is it that the last time a majority of registered voters were Republican, Herbert Hoover was president?
The GOP wants part-time Legislature because it would rather destroy representative democracy -- and leave the bureaucracy untouched -- than accept that the average Californian doesn't agree with the radicals who control the Republican Party in this state today.
California faces real problems, including a government structure that needs to be brought into the 21st century. Groups like California Forward and the Bay Area Council are discussing serious, constructive reforms that we need to seriously consider. But crippling one branch of government isn't constructive. It's petulant, ill-conceived and will simply make things worse.
Steve Maviglio is Director of Californians for an Effective Legislature. He served as a part-time legislator in the New Hampshire House for six years.
