Legislature Should Be Cut Back to Part Time

The lawmakers have left town and gone home. And that’s where they should stay until January.

They won’t. They’ll be back on Aug. 18 to plow through the final four weeks of this year’s legislative session -- which is the first half of a two-year session.

This is considered a “full-time” legislature, one of only 10 in the country. All in big states.

The biggest state, I’ve now concluded, should downgrade its Legislature to part time.

If the Legislature can’t be reformed, it should be restrained. Damage contained. Losses cut.

Roughly 2,700 bills still are floating around the Capitol. How many of these are really needed by anybody except the special interests that bankroll politicians? Maybe a dozen.

Nearly 1,500 bills already have been passed by at least one house -- the most important and abhorrent being the $99-billion state budget.

This wasn’t a budget; it was an IOU. What Gov. Gray Davis signed Saturday was a credit-card charge slip.

“It was the best we could do,” legislative leaders insist. Yes, and that’s the trouble.

The budget, again, wasn’t even on time -- not passed until 29 days into the fiscal year, 44 days past the legislators’ constitutional deadline.

It’s not entirely the legislators’ fault. They’re mostly good people working in a rotten system. Some of it has been self-created. But much has been imposed by voters -- most notably with term limits. These limits -- six years in the Assembly, eight in the Senate -- need to be lengthened. Maybe to 12 or 16 years total, pick a house.

Inexperience and job insecurity -- eyes always out for the next career move -- aren’t the only unintended consequences of term limits. There’s a destructive lack of institutional pride -- of inherent desire, nurtured by longevity, to ensure that the Legislature succeeds. Short-timers are narrowly focused on the mirror.

Other reforms also are needed, including:

* Closed primaries should be reopened to produce more moderate, pragmatic legislators. The political parties have fought this ferociously, but former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan and state Controller Steve Westly are planning a 2004 ballot initiative.

* Redistricting needs to be seized from the Legislature and handed to an independent commission, probably appointed by the state Supreme Court. The lawmakers’ 2001 gerrymandering produced districts that protect the party status quo while electing ideological extremists.

But absent reforms, let’s go back to a part-time legislature. Pare back on a bad thing.

“I’m a convert to the idea,” says Bob Stern, president of the Center for Governmental Studies. Sounding a common refrain, he adds: “We have a part-time legislature now. It sits around in January, February and March and does absolutely nothing.”

Not exactly nothing. Lawmakers hit up special interests for campaign money all the time they’re in Sacramento.

Some history: Voters promoted the Legislature to full-time status in 1966. Before that, it met for a six-month session one year and a 90-day budget-only session the next. The budget always got passed by July 1.

Assembly Speaker Jesse “Big Daddy” Unruh led the charge for a full-time legislature. He preached -- and virtually everybody believed -- that the high-minded purpose was to “professionalize” the Legislature and make it less dependent on the governor for information and analysis. Personally, I always thought this was mere justification for jacking up legislative pay by nearly triple. (It’s now up to $99,000 -- $113,850 for leaders.)

Whatever, the full-timers performed well into the late 1970s -- the Gov. Jerry Brown era -- when they lollygagged on property tax relief and everything went downhill. But that’s another column.

Bob Monagan, the 1966 Assembly Republican leader from Tracy, a moderate who later became speaker, wrote a book in 1990 calling for a return to a part-time legislature. “The Legislature should adjourn each year on July 1. Period, “ he wrote.

“Sticky, difficult and controversial though they may be, problems need to be confronted in a timely manner and not postponed.... If today’s Legislature can’t do it, it’s because we have the wrong people representing us.”

Recently I phoned Monagan, 83 -- still active on boards and playing golf -- to ask whether he’d change his mind. Nope.

“They’d be better legislators if they spent more time in their communities and had to come face to face with their constituents,” he said. “Their constituents now are the guys in Sacramento with the big checks.”

He’d have lawmakers, while adjourned, holding in-depth hearings on tough issues and conducting oversight of state agencies. Planning and probing.

And one other thing: If legislators didn’t pass a budget on time, he’d force them into recall elections. “I don’t think you’d reach that stage. Nobody would want to be out of office for a day.”

Until now, I’ve thought California had too many complex problems to retreat into part-time lawmaking. But I’ve concluded that without reforms, retreat is rational. When you’re in a hole, stop digging.