A Budget Process Built to Fail

For a California Legislature that couldn’t agree on very much this budget season, there is surprising consensus on one point: its own ineptitude.

Disdainful as the public is of lawmakers’ performance, the verdict of state officials is scarcely more forgiving.

Steve Peace, Gov. Gray Davis’ finance director, said that when faced with a true political crisis -- in this case a budget shortfall the size of the gross domestic product of Ecuador -- the state’s leadership is “systematically ill-equipped to respond, because we accidentally designed the system to fail.”

The failure is rooted in a trio of political realities, some well-intended, that have conspired over time to inhibit the Legislature from meeting big challenges, according to past and present lawmakers and political analysts.

A strict term limit law approved by voters in 1990 has drained the Legislature of members steeped in the workings of the institution, skilled in the art of compromise.

A redrawing of legislative districts two years ago is filling the chambers with ideologues at both ends of the spectrum, the result of carving safe districts that protect incumbents.

And a state constitutional requirement that the budget pass by a two-thirds vote is proving a daunting barrier.

“The extremes on both sides are preventing solutions to serious problems that California faces, not just the budget problem,” said Assemblyman Keith Richman, a Northridge Republican who is one of the few moderates in the GOP caucus. “We’re not getting pragmatic solutions to workers’ compensation, energy, unemployment insurance.

“The Legislature is dysfunctional.”

Through term limits and reapportionment, a new wave of lawmakers is coming to dominate in Sacramento, analysts said. The term limit movement was driven by frustration over the marathon reign of Willie Brown, the former Assembly Speaker who served in Sacramento for 31 years.

But in their attempt to freshen the legislative ranks with a rotating crop of citizen-lawmakers, proponents of term limits have produced legislators with modest commitment to the institution, to one another or to the state’s enduring interests, colleagues say.

“It limits long-term thinking,” said Joe Canciamilla, a Pittsburg Democrat recognized as one of the Assembly’s centrists. “The tendency is to vote more for political expediency or because of the pressure to support the caucus position than on something that is in the long-term best interests of the state.”

Senators may serve no more than eight years; Assembly members, six. As soon as they are elected, lawmakers are plotting their next move. Camaraderie is tough to sustain. Every colleague is a potential opponent in some future election.

Sen. John Vasconcellos (D-Santa Clara), the state’s longest-serving lawmaker, said: “A third of the folks have been here for six months and they walk into a $38-billion hole. There is no mentoring. No seasoning. No history. No loyalty. This is an awesome responsibility. Not just a trite piece of work. You really have to understand what’s going on.”

On Monday, some lawmakers in a private Assembly caucus mistakenly thought they could amend the state budget bill and send it back to the Senate, unaware that such a step isn’t possible once the other chamber has gone home.

Even those who once embraced term limits are now having second thoughts.

Howard Kaloogian is a former GOP assemblyman and term limit supporter who now chairs a committee that wants to recall Gov. Gray Davis. Kaloogian said of the restriction: “In your first year or two you don’t know anything and in your last year you’re considered a lame duck and not worth listening to. So you really only have an effective time of two or three years out of the six in the Assembly. And that’s pretty limiting.”

Barbara O’Connor, director of the Institute for the Study of Politics and Media at Cal State Sacramento, said the quality of candidates is eroding, in part due to term limits.

“Now we have a full-time Legislature with short terms and a huge responsibility to raise funds to be elected and a beholdenness to political contributors and party leadership that is unparalleled. And those events lead to the crisis we’re in now,” O’Connor said.

When they come from diverse districts, lawmakers must be sensitive to a breadth of opinion. But in redrawing the district lines after the 2000 census, the legislature created seats in which incumbents were virtually assured victory in the general election.

The only real challenge comes in the primaries, which tend to reward candidates who gravitate to the extremes. What is left is a polarized Legislature -- hostile to centrists, scornful of conciliation, deeply partisan.

Richman knows. Club for Growth, a conservative political action committee based in Washington, D.C., said it is watching Richman, who supports a sales tax increase. If necessary, the organization said it would run radio and television ads and recruit primary opponents to punish Republicans who break ranks. Stephen Moore, president of the Club for Growth, was invited to a private GOP caucus lunch in June, a visit that sent an unmistakable message to Republicans who might be wavering.

“We’re certainly really putting the screws on those Republicans to not agree to any tax increase,” Moore said in an interview. “The guy we have our eye on is Richman. We’re preparing for a potential defection.”

In the face of such threats, centrist groups need to fight back and pump money into the campaigns of lawmakers striking a more conciliatory posture, said Bruce Cain, director of the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley.

That happens all too seldom, he said. “What you have is party leaderships that are threatening people and taking advantage of the redistricting, which is creating these safe seats, and saying, ‘I’ll take you out in the primary with my party activists.’ ”

In this atmosphere, passing bills by a simple majority can be tough enough. The two-thirds requirement needed for a budget calls for a bipartisan spirit that has been nearly extinguished. As it stands now, the Assembly is made up of 48 Democrats and 32 Republicans; the Senate, 25 Democrats and 15 Republicans.

Apart from California, two other states -- Arkansas and Rhode Island -- require a “super-majority” to pass a budget. Arkansas, which requires a three-fourths majority, has witnessed some of the same gridlock as California.

The super-majority requirement “has allowed certain [lawmakers in the minority] to hold up the budget and use it as blackmail,” said Bill Goodman, assistant director of Arkansas’ bureau of legislative research.

The requirement doesn’t account for the stark ideological differences that prevail in Sacramento, Cain said.

“The theory is that you want to get people to compromise and to develop a super-majority,” Cain said. “But that requires a politics that will allow people to negotiate across party lines, without threat. And of course we don’t have that right now.... We have, ‘We will punish you if you deal with the other side.’ And that kind of thinking is absolutely ruinous in a bipartisan setting.”

At times the Legislature seemed less interested in ending the budget stalemate than in prolonging it. With no budget approved three weeks into the new fiscal year -- and with the state beginning to cut off money to some programs -- Democrats were caught on tape discussing ways to draw out the stalemate, in hopes of building support for a ballot initiative that would make it easier to raise taxes.

At one point, Senate Republican leader Jim Brulte threatened to campaign against any member of his delegation who broke ranks and endorsed tax increases to close the $38-billion shortfall, meaning Republicans who sought a compromise could pay with their ouster.

“I can give you a million examples on both sides,” said Peace, a former legislator. “Both parties are equally culpable. And in the end I can’t even blame them. It’s us. We got what we asked for.”

There is no want for suggested reforms.

State Controller Steve Westly said he will be “out front” on a movement to lengthen legislative tenure.

“In simple terms, the system is broken,” said Westly.

A coalition of teachers, state employees and the League of Women Voters is collecting signatures for a ballot initiative that, among other things, would lower the threshold for passing a state budget from 66% to 55%, which Democrats support. They hope to get the measure on the ballot in March.

And a bipartisan group of legislators is looking into entrusting an independent commission with redrawing legislative districts, so that protection of incumbents is not the driving imperative.

If nothing changes, some foresee more of the same: budget showdowns, divisiveness and a deepening paralysis.

“When you put the two-thirds vote in place you’ve designed a system where an irresponsible leader of a band of people that number one-third can dictate the course of action on the budget,” said former Speaker Brown, now mayor of San Francisco. “If you add to that the severe partisanship that comes from the reapportionment plan ... and then you sprinkle that with the incredible level of inexperience that comes from term limits -- plus the absence of what I believe is the key ingredient in the legislative process: personal friendships -- you have a system that probably will never work.”