IIs improving the Legislature possible

Is improving the Legislature possible - or just more hot air?

Sacramento Bee, The (CA)

January 9, 2006

The deterioration of the California Legislature as a policymaking body over the last few decades is an incontrovertible fact.

Simply put, the Legislature became endemically incapable of responding to the difficult political issues that naturally arise in a society that's growing and changing as rapidly as California's - such as educating an ever-diversifying population for an ever-changing economy, handling the crushing demand from population growth for water, housing and transportation, or coping with sharpening socioeconomic stratification.

Increasingly, those and other knotty issues are either shifted to local officials to handle as best they can, or become subjects of a seemingly endless stream of ballot measures that put the onus on voters to make policy. The Legislature, meanwhile, has become a sideshow, preoccupied with doing favors for narrow interests, publicity stunts and political gotcha games.

While the Legislature's decline is accepted as a fact, why it faded, and what might be done to restore it to some level of potency and relevance, are matters of ceaseless debate in political, civic and academic circles.

A strong case can be made that California 's ever-deepening socioeconomic and political complexity precludes forming the civic consensus on major issues that the political system needs to function. In other words, the very factors - unique to California - that create tough political issues also may make it impossible for legislators to address them.

Given that complexity, it would take a sweeping structural change in state and perhaps local government to fully overcome - perhaps, even, a shift away from the federalist system with its myriad "checks and balances" that often are impediments to decisions.

Even if the Legislature's travails are rooted in conditions outside the Capitol, however, they have been made infinitely worse by political factors, including the voting public's periodic and largely misguided attempts at reform. Indeed, one could postulate that the Legislature's decline began in 1966 when voters made the Legislature a full-time, professional body on the promise that it would become more responsive and effective.

Professionalism, however, backfired, pulling the attention of legislators inward, making them more interested in their own comforts and careers and less interested in policy, and leading to payoff scandals that resulted, in 1990, in another effort at reform: legislative term limits. Term limits, however, solved none of the Capitol's fundamental problems while creating a batch of new ones.

The Legislature's effectiveness declined even further when leaders of both parties agreed in 2001 to carve up legislative districts to preclude two-party competition for seats. Lawmakers have become even less responsive because they are no longer answerable to voters, even though polls indicate that the Legislature's standing with the public has been plummeting. And the gerrymander's corollary effect was that the ideological extremes gained power at the expense of moderates, leading to even more stasis - with the deficit-ridden state budget a prime example.

In the absence of fundamental structural change, we can't do anything about socioeconomic factors that depress the Legislature's effectiveness. But we could do something about the systemic factors - such as term limits and gerrymandered districts - that drove its efficacy even lower.

A new redistricting reform is being proposed as a ballot measure, and leaders of both parties and both legislative houses say that despite voter rejection of redistricting reform last year, they're ready to put drawing new districts after the 2010 census in the hands of an independent commission. Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez says he's "very committed," and both he and Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata also say they would like to see some mild changes in term limits, such as allowing a member to serve a full quota of years in one house.

Public intentions are one thing, but product is another. It would be a sham, for example, if a supposedly independent redistricting commission were to be controlled by politicians.

Producing an honest redistricting and term limit reform package will be a test of whether the Legislature really wants to improve itself, or just talk about it and continue to deteriorate.

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Reach Dan Walters at (916) 321-1195 or dwalters@sacbee.com. Back columns: www.sacbee.com/walters

Edition: METRO FINAL
Section: MAIN NEWS
Page: A3

Record Number: SAC_0405043793