Legislators Explore Fight on Term Limits

Legislative leaders, angered by voter approval of a measure to limit their terms, Wednesday began exploring legal challenges to Proposition 140, contending it is unconstitutional to let voters at large kick out lawmakers elected by constituents in their home districts.

At the same time, lawmakers, their staffs and lobbyists were pondering what the fed-up California electorate had wrought by sending most incumbents back to Sacramento while handing every member of the Legislature a political pink slip.

In addition to limiting Assembly members to six years in office and state senators to eight, the landmark ballot initiative also caps at eight years the service of statewide officers, slashes the Legislature’s operating budget by as much as 50% and eliminates the lawmakers’ pension program, all in a move its authors predict will return power to “citizen politicians.”

But the professionals who were the target of the term-limit movement complained bitterly that the measure will usher in an era of amateurism in which the public’s elected representatives will be outsmarted and outlasted by big-business lobbyists and lifetime bureaucrats.

“I find it personally insulting and stupid,” said one of the Assembly’s senior members, Democrat John Vasconcellos of Santa Clara. “Now we won’t have an independent, well-informed legislative branch of government.”

There also was more than a hint of retribution. Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, the powerful San Francisco Democrat who has ruled the Legislature’s lower house for a decade, said he will take out his anger on a handful of Republicans who backed the measure.

“The first people to experience staff cuts will be the people who supported it,” Brown said.

The measure passed by a margin of about 242,000 votes out of more than 6.6 million cast.

Some Assembly Republicans, meanwhile, were said to be plotting the overthrow of minority leader Ross Johnson of La Habra, who opposed term limits. The party had a net loss of two seats to the Democrats on Tuesday, reducing their number to just 32 in the 80-member Assembly and providing an ignominious conclusion to the GOP’s once proud goal of seizing control of the Legislature by 1990.

Assemblyman Bill Jones of Fresno said Wednesday that he has secured commitments from enough Republicans to oust Johnson at a meeting scheduled for today in Sacramento. But Johnson said he expected to keep his post.

Just five of the 92 incumbent legislators on Tuesday’s ballot were defeated. Assembly Republicans on the losing end included Sunny Mojonnier of Encinitas, Jeff Marston of San Diego and Curt Pringle of Garden Grove, although Pringle’s result could change as the last of the absentee ballots are counted. Democratic Assemblyman Norm Waters of Plymouth in Northern California also was defeated.

In the Senate, Democrats gained a seat for a total of 25 with the defeat of Republican Jim Nielsen of Rohnert Park by former legislative aide Mike Thompson. If the one remaining Senate vacancy goes to the Democrats as expected, they would be just one vote short of the two-thirds majority needed to override gubernatorial vetoes. In the Assembly the Democrats would need the votes of six Republicans to override the governor.

For the vast majority of incumbents who were returned to office, the question is whether Proposition 140 will send them packing in six years. Speaker Brown and Senate President Pro Tem David A. Roberti declined to discuss the issue with reporters Wednesday. Roberti sent a memo to fellow senators indicating he was ready to implement the budget cut part of the measure.

But Roberti’s memo also said that the legal issues surrounding implementation of the initiative “are under review.” Several sources close to Brown and Roberti said a legal challenge to term limits was certain to be filed. The plaintiff in such a lawsuit would probably be a citizen claiming a violation of federal Constitutional rights.

“What it comes down to is an infringement on the right of the people in any district to vote for their own representation,” said Joseph Remcho, a San Francisco lawyer who has represented Democrats in past efforts to overturn voter-approved initiatives.

Remcho said it is one thing for the state’s voters to agree to limit the terms of statewide officers, such as the governor, whom they elect jointly. But it is unfair and unconstitutional, he said, for the voters in one district to decide who can or cannot represent voters in another district.

Said Remcho: “The voters in Orange County have told the voters in San Francisco that they can’t elect Willie Brown. They have told the voters in a whole bunch of other districts that they can’t elect the representatives of their choice. I don’t see that they have articulated a state interest compelling enough to justify that restriction on my right to vote.”

But Lewis K. Uhler, president of the National Tax-Limitation Committee and one of the authors of Proposition 140, said a legal challenge by incumbent legislators would be “almost an obscenity.” And Los Angeles County Supervisor Pete Schabarum, who co-wrote the measure, said he would personally lead the effort to defend the initiative.

“I am not enthusiastic, given the way the courts have been acting these days, that we have a guarantee of this whole proposition being sustained,” Schabarum said. “But we’ll do the best we can.”

If Proposition 140 does withstand challenge, it will take effect in stages. First will come the elimination of future pension benefits for anyone elected in Tuesday’s balloting and from now on. Then, next year, the Legislature’s operating budget will be cut an estimated 50%, to no more than $950,000 per member. The reduction is expected to result in widespread layoffs, a source of anxiety to many Capitol staffers.

The real blow from Proposition 140 will come in 1996, when anyone elected to the Assembly this year, along with 20 state senators who now are in the middle of a term, will be forced to leave office. Two years later, the rest of the state Senate and all statewide officeholders elected this week will be forced out.

Times staff writers Max Boot, Mark Gladstone, Carl Ingram, Paul Jacobs and Richard Simon contributed to this article.