California’s Legislature: More Than a Floor Show

“Hey feller, don’t stand there talking to yourself. If you’re crazy, come join the Legislature,” quick-witted and abrasive Assemblyman Richard E. Floyd (D-Hawthorne) calls out to a TV cameraman on the periphery of the Assembly floor. At the rear row of desks, the comic antics of 36-year-old Assemblyman Charles M. Calderon (D-Montebello) have three fellow lawmakers--Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica), Richard Polanco (D-Los Angeles) and Thomas H. Bates (D-Oakland) cracking up.

“Come on, let’s go, I want to get out of here,” a legislator, anxious to catch the early Thursday afternoon flight to his district, demands like a student squirming at his desk.

Can this be the California Legislature, reputed to be the best organized, most efficient, highest quality state legislative body in the nation?

“Most people are appalled by the floor sessions,” commented State Sen. Gary K. Hart (D-Santa Barbara). “The Assembly reminds me of a junior high school at recess. The Senate has the air of a convalescent home.”

The reality is that floor sessions, whether in the U.S. Congress or in a state legislature, tend to consist of voting, posturing and socializing in about equal measure. The floor is the place where lawmakers utter statements to impress their constituents, not to influence their fellow legislators--debate seldom affects votes. The floor also serves as a legislative coffeehouse, where members exchange information, lobby one another and gossip. While the floor sessions of the California Legislature are a model of efficiency compared with those of Congress, the fact remains that from January through May, the twice-weekly meetings are designed as much to enable state legislators to collect their $75-a-day per diem seven days a week as to conduct business. It’s only from June through August, when the budget and most of the thousands of bills emerge from the bowels of the committees, that the sessions take on a more intense character.

In contrast to Congress, which is dominated by lawyers, the Legislature is composed of a cross section of the middle class, and reflects middle-class values. There are no bakers and no butchers; but beyond the 44 members who list themselves as full-time legislators, no fewer than two dozen professions are represented. Most numerous are attorneys (21) and businessmen (14), followed by ranchers, farmers, educators and insurance brokers (some half-dozen each). Such professionals as a banker, a doctor, a dentist, a veterinarian, an accountant and a contractor make the Legislature the essence of a self-contained community. There’s even a geologist--he’d be helpful, no doubt, in drafting no-fault insurance.

A legislator doesn’t have great visibility. The average person has difficulty recalling who his assemblyman or state senator is. By and large, the media doesn’t pay the Legislature the attention it deserves; with the exception of tax law, it is state legislation, not federal, that has the greater impact on people’s everyday lives. With some exceptions, the quality of state legislators compares favorably with that of congressmen; and one can argue that the heterogeneity on the state level is more democratic and effective than the pin-striped conformity of the U.S. Senate.

The Assembly represents the entry level to professional politics, as distinguished from the part-time politics practiced by most local civic bodies. The typical assemblyman, in his mid-40s, about 10 years younger than a state senator, has served an apprenticeship on a city council, school board or similar body. In his third or fourth term, he is looking to move on: to the state Senate, to Congress, to other high office, or to a lucrative career as a lobbyist. No more than a handful have as much as 13 years service--which is the median for a state senator. Although Republicans and Democrats may disagree vehemently with one another in public, the hallmark of the successful legislator is the ability to make friends and influence fellow lawmakers, whatever their political perspective, behind the scenes. The strident ideologue who harasses and embarrasses fellow members, or the legislative gadfly, who introduces scores of “ego bills” that have little substantive value, are ineffective.

A case in point is provided by the Senate Education Committee. Hart, the chairman, is the archetype of the Vietnam-era rebel matured into the 1980s laid-back liberal. Ed Davis (R-Chatsworth), a committee member, is the gruff former Los Angeles police chief whose political philosophy is the diametric opposite of Hart’s. Yet in 1983 they cooperated to produce the most significant education bill since the 1960s.

Hart, a four-sport athlete who holds degrees from Stanford and Harvard, first campaigned for the Assembly in 1972. The race was a model of family planning--his wife, Cary, was to matriculate at the University of California at Davis Medical School while he legislated nearby in Sacramento. Cary was accepted. But he lost the election by a few hundred votes. So Cary transferred to UCLA. Two years later the voters sent Gary, by then a teacher, to Sacramento, while Cary remained in Westwood. They met, like refugees from their careers, in Santa Barbara on weekends.

Today they have three daughters and Cary is a pediatrician in Sacramento. But Gary still spends most weekends attending constituents in his gerrymandered district, which stretches from Santa Barbara to Woodland Hills. No career tests marriage more than a legislator’s.

While Hart is the professional politician, carefully charting his way, Sen. Davis, a quarter-century Hart’s senior, donned the political mantle like an old smoking jacket after retiring as Los Angeles police chief. A one-time favorite of the ultraconservatives, Davis alienated the Legislature’s right-wing guru, Sen. H.L. Richardson (R-Arcadia), and now accuses Richardson of waging a “terrorist campaign” against him. A bear of a man, Davis delights in the shock value of outrageous statements, which always have an element of put-on to them. When people first suggested he run for political office, he said he told them: “If I do, I’ll have a proctologist examine my head.”

He calls himself “a conservative with compassion,” and since Hiram Johnson, California’s godfather of progressive Republicanism, is his role model, it may not be surprising that Davis has developed into a consummate maverick, outraging the orthodox but providing a breeze of relief from political sophistry. His support of gay rights threw large numbers of Republicans into paroxysms of disbelief, and his allegations against Rep. Bobbi Fiedler (R-Northridge) were regarded as a betrayal of party unity.

When he sponsors a bill, he invites all interested parties, from the National Rifle Assn. to the American Civil Liberties Union, to air their views. “I may disagree with them 80% of the time, but I’ll agree with them the other 20%,” he said of the ACLU, “so let’s see what they say about it because you know damn well they’re going to say something and they might have a good point.”

He compares the Legislature to a bicycle. The wheels are the two chambers and the steering is provided by the committees, but the pedal power usually comes from outside. “Hell, we don’t know what we’re doing. You’ve got to tell us what you want us to do.” Lobbyists are among his favorite people--”If they didn’t exist, I’d have to invent them.” He puffs contemplatively on his pipe. “I just love it when the giants like the AMA (American Medical Assn.) and the (American) Bar Association knock each other off.”

For the better part of Hart’s first decade in the Legislature, declining enrollment and the passage of Proposition 13 frustrated his efforts to improve the educational climate. It was only after the decline in California’s quality of education became critical and Bill Honig, a Republican, was elected state superintendent of public instruction that a bipartisan effort for educational reform and increased funding became practical.

Davis, whose interest in education is spurred by his daughter’s teaching in the San Fernando Valley, became Honig’s inside man on the Senate Education Committee. Teresa P. Hughes (D-Los Angeles), a former educator, introduced a compatible bill in the Assembly. Together they represented an advocacy that Gov. George Deukmejian, a somewhat reluctant participant, found difficult to oppose. When the governor indicated he would not agree to an expenditure of $800 million, Davis let it be known that he would join with the Democrats, and personally lead the rebellion. The schools got their $800 million.

Even as Hart represents the maturing liberal and Davis the mellowing hard-bitten right-winger, so Tom McClintock (R-Thousand Oaks) is the epitome of the up-and-coming team player. Fascinated by politics since the third grade, McClintock chartered the Student Republican Organization at Thousand Oaks High School when he was 15.

A polished writer in an era when most writing resembles a high-fiber diet, McClintock, upon graduating from UCLA in 1978, persuaded Marv Sosna, the editor of his hometown paper, the Conejo News-Chronicle, to publish his column expounding the conservative viewpoint. When Davis was elected to the state Senate in 1980, he hired McClintock as his administrative assistant. Two years later, when former Republican Assemblyman Charles Imbrecht (R-Camarillo) vacated his seat to run for the state Senate--and lose--against Hart, McClintock replaced him in the Assembly. At 26 he was the third-youngest legislator in state history.

McClintock’s detractors have sometimes characterized him as a cherubic hit-man of the Nixon ilk. But the truth is that McClintock, with a Yuppie perspective, is the antithesis of Nixon in all but political philosophy. The opposite of an infighter, he is fascinated by rules and procedure, and has made himself one of the nation’s most skilled parliamentarians. One might look upon him as the ultimate idealist--his vision of the future is to progress to the past, to recapture a Norman Rockwell America that perhaps never was.

Committed and skilled, he has, as one of two minority whips, advanced into the Republican legislative leadership in less time than it might take to obtain a graduate degree. Conversely, he has gained Democrats’ respect as an able tactician who can accept defeat graciously. McClintock’s style is reminiscent of the late U.S. Sen. Robert Taft (R-Ohio), who became known for his saying, “Well, if nobody else wants to do it, I will,” and wound up as the Republican leader.

Nevertheless, even McClintock’s friends ask whether he is tough enough, and suggest that he might need more practical experience to go along with his impressive academic knowledge. “After all,” said one of his close advisers, “it’s not as if he’s ever held a 9-to-5 job.” It is a question that was spotlighted when McClintock, the favored candidate to replace Fiedler in the House of Representatives after Fiedler decided to try for the Republican senatorial nomination, allowed himself to be bluffed out of the race by comedian Bob Hope’s son Anthony, a Washington accountant who became a drop-in candidate in a district in which he had not lived for more than a decade. Hope lost decisively in the primary.

Polls tend to rank politicians somewhere below plumbers in U.S. public esteem. That should be cause for concern both among politicians and the public. If people knew their representatives better, more as humans and less as orators and symbols, they would probably hold them in higher regard.

Most of us have difficulty obtaining the information we require to make intelligent decisions about all but the principal figures on a ballot. To a considerable degree, it’s our own fault. We won’t get what we don’t demand. We need to remind ourselves that the vote we cast on Election Day will give someone the power to influence our lives for years to come.