First There Was the Recall, Now We Need the Revamp

In October, the people of California voted to change the profligate deficit-spending approach of the last five years. So the voters replaced Gray Davis with Arnold Schwarzenegger, chosen largely because of the latter’s promise to roll back tax spending.

Yet just weeks after Schwarzenegger was sworn into office, his effort to control spending and restore fiscal responsibility is facing strong opposition. The opposition comes not from the 4 million California voters who placed him in office but from the 120 members of the state Legislature.

It is outrageous that the leadership and many members of the Legislature are ignoring the clear desire of most Californians to bring the state’s fiscal situation back under control and end the runaway spending programs of recent years.

How does this happen?

The root cause is remarkably simple -- most members of the Legislature are protected from the voters. They won their seats in “safe” districts; that is, districts so heavily weighted with voters registered in one party or the other that the incumbents are protected from any real challengers. When they won a primary, with as low as 13% of the voters, those legislators were guaranteed reelection.

Why are those seats so safe? Because the Legislature draws up the boundaries of its own districts, making each one as safe from challenge as is possible. This produces a body that is overwhelmingly unresponsive to the public. It seems to be responsive only to pressure groups that seek their favor and ply them with money. Legislators can follow their own ideology, without regard to whether it is what the people want.

When the people say they want fiscal responsibility, and when they elect a governor pledged to restoring responsibility, the legislators can say “no” because they know the voters can’t vote them out.

The only way to change that intransigence on the part of the legislators is to change the way they are elected. Californians need to make legislative elections genuinely competitive. The only way to do that is to take the power of reapportionment away from the people who have the power now and who have the biggest conflict, the legislators themselves.

The People’s Advocate, the citizens group I head, has begun circulating petitions that would remove the responsibility for creating legislative districts from the legislators. It proposes that instead the task be given to a neutral board of retired judges, who would be required to create fair districts that are compact and homogeneous.

By doing that, many of those districts would be competitive in future elections. Candidates would have to run on their records. And they would have to be responsive to the voters who elected them -- and could unelect them.

Certainly they would be more responsive than the present members of the Legislature, who are thumbing their noses at the wishes of voters.