Dan Walters: Should California Legislature go part time?

California's Legislature once was a part-time body. One ballot proposal would restore that schedule and remove lawmakers from "the seductive atmosphere of the Capitol dome," a critic says. 425.

Shannon Grove, a Republican assemblywoman from Bakersfield, is sponsoring an embryonic ballot measure to return the California Legislature to a part-time body, which it was before 1966.

File: In this photo taken March 3, 2011, Assemblywoman Shannon Grove, R-Bakersfield is seen with a list of existing California state agencies she has posted on her office door at the Capitol in Sacramento, Calif., Thursday, March 3, 2011. Grove, who was elected to the Assembly in 2010, is among a group of lawmakers who would like to see government streamlined, including the elimination of many of the agencies on the list. (AP Photo)

ADVERTISEMENT

It's one of dozens of proposals for the November ballot and, like most, faces an uphill struggle to qualify and win. But it could resonate with voters because of chronic dysfunction on the budget, water and other issues, and lawmakers' very low stature in polls.

Grove contends that making them part-timers, with $18,000-a-year salaries, would "get them away from the seductive atmosphere of the Capitol dome, get them back home with family, neighbors and work, and give them a better chance, as a citizen legislator, to serve their constituents' best interests."

Ted Costa of People's Advocate, a major supporter of legislative term limits 22 years ago, is co-sponsoring the Grove measure. Her argument today is similar to what voters were told then. But term limits did not cure the Legislature's indolence.

On the flip side, former Democratic Assemblyman Dario Frommer heads the campaign against the Grove measure. "We had a part-time Legislature in California. It was widely viewed as corrupt and ineffective," Frommer contends, adding that if voters enact the Grove measure, "you are going to make it worse and give special interests even more sway than they hold today."

So the debate resumes: How do we fix the Legislature? Should term limits go away, or should legislators become part-timers again? Would any simplistic nostrum improve it?

Yes, the part-time Legislature was at least semi-corrupt, but during the post-World War II era, its members separated corruption on relatively petty issues, such as control of liquor sales, from an otherwise exemplary record on creating world-class highways, universities and other facilities and services.

The pitch to voters in 1966 ? that a full-time Legislature would be more responsive, efficient and honest ? was dead wrong.

When careerists, many straight off the legislative staff, took over, corruption blossomed, culminating in multiple federal prosecutions for pay-to-play shakedowns. And action on public policy issues languished.

Voters reacted to scandal with term limits, which cracked the Capitol's frat house atmosphere and opened new opportunities for women and minorities, especially Latinos. But term limits didn't improve its performance on critical issues.

This history could be a rationale for returning to a part-time Legislature, but really tells us that whether it's a full- or part-time body, or whether its terms are limited matter little to the civic bottom line.

California's crisis of governance is deeply rooted and immune to silver-bullet solutions.

We need deeper and broader structural reform.

?

FOLLOW US @OCRegLetters

WRITE A LETTER TO THE EDITOR Letters to the Editor: E-mail to letters@ocregister.com. Please provide your name, city and telephone number (telephone numbers will not be published). Letters of about 200 words or videos of 30-seconds each will be given preference. Letters will be edited for length, grammar and clarity.

Source: http://www.ocregister.com/opinion/legislature-340089-time-term.html

justin bieber baby justin bieber baby credit unions tower heist reviews recursion amy schumer amy schumer