Institutional Amnesia Does Have Its Good Points

Score one point for term limits. Watching Assemblyman Bob Hertzberg being reelected speaker in a love feast Monday, it was striking how many of these same Assembly members had been there six years ago at arguably the historic low point for this house. The number was precisely zero.

It seems like only last week--well, Halloween week--that then-Speaker Willie Brown and allegiant Democrats dug deep into their ugly bag of tricks to desperately cling to power. They made today’s Al Gore look humble and magnanimous.

Most Republicans thought they had won a one-vote Assembly majority in the November 1994 elections. But Brown coaxed one Republican into a GOP double-cross so the future San Francisco mayor could hang on awhile as speaker. Two other Republicans also subsequently committed party treason, enabling wily Willie to set up a puppet GOP speakership.

Voters responded by recalling two of the Republican turncoats and bouncing the third at the next primary election.

Much of that Assembly craziness was a symptom of conniption fits caused by term limit anxiety.

Fortunately, none of the old bad blood remains. Term limits have provided a complete transfusion. Nobody then an Assembly member is one today, although some have moved on to the Senate.

Consequently, the mood was so mellow Monday that Hertzberg (D-Sherman Oaks) was reelected speaker by acclamation.

*

Similarly, it was striking that none of the current Assembly Republicans were house members in 1996 when the GOP finally seized power--and immediately began looking foolish and committing political suicide.

Among the Republicans’ initial top priorities that year was a bill making it easier for citizens to pack concealed sidearms. Hey, Texas Gov. George W. Bush signed such a bill! The California Assembly passed the measure and it died in the Senate.

Likewise, Assembly Republicans used their new levers of control to push bizarre bills that would have repealed the motorcycle helmet law, restored classroom spankings and allowed paddling of graffiti vandals. It wasn’t exactly the visionary agenda that most voters were looking for from Sacramento. The GOP was kept in power just one year.

Indeed, term limits bopped the paddle bill crusader and he was replaced by Bill Campbell (R-Villa Park), 58, a Taco Bell chain operator who was just elected Assembly minority leader.

Republicans now occupy only 29 of the 80 Assembly seats. How do you climb back, I asked Campbell. “By talking to voters about what they’re interested in,” he replied.

“Education, energy, the future of California; keeping it a place we all enjoy. In the early ‘90s, it was tax cuts and public safety. I don’t sense that people are leaping up and down to hear about those issues now.”

Campbell says Republicans will propose spending $1 billion of the projected $10.3-billion state budget surplus on school construction-- paying cash rather than borrowing with bonds. They’ll also advocate pouring another $320 million into community colleges.

These are centrist ideas, but make no mistake: Campbell is very conservative. In fact, he has never voted for a state budget and says he won’t as long as it pays for abortions. But since Medi-Cal abortions are a given, how can Campbell be a legislative leader and help negotiate a budget if he’ll never vote for the settlement?

“It was a quandary I had to think about before running for leader,” he admits. One answer, Campbell says, revolves around a basic fact: He’ll know the price for securing enough Republican votes to pass a budget and--face it--Democrats will need only four.

*

Hertzberg, 46, a lawyer and lifelong political activist, is firmly in control--at least as firmly as anybody can be who’s permitted only one two-year stint as Assembly headman.

One way to get a rise out of the speaker is to suggest that under term limits, short-timers are bound to be less productive. “I just can’t accept that premise, man,” he says. “If I accepted that premise, what am I doing in this job? The job’s to make it work. Period.”

Hertzberg has whittled down the number of Assembly committees so members can focus on fewer issues and, hopefully, become experts. He’s urging big picture thinking and also some “oversight” of state government.

The speaker promises a solution to soaring electricity rates and says he “wouldn’t rule out” re-regulation--thus possibly reversing what that infamous 1996 Legislature imposed. “Everything’s on the table.”

For now at least, it’s all hugs and high-minded rhetoric in the Assembly. On occasion, lack of institutional memory is a good thing--especially when no one’s around who remembers the ugly times.