Age Before Duty

This is the age of revolving-door democracy in California. It’s the era of term limits and recalls and contempt for the Legislature, a time when an erstwhile action movie star can run the nation’s largest state government and a freshman lawmaker can rule the Assembly.

Now another threshold looms for California politics: The last of the Legislature’s big-time veterans, all four of them, are about to exit.

Forced out by term limits, they will depart with more than a century of cumulative experience in the Capitol. They will leave behind a crowd that is younger and less seasoned, with few links to the past.

Sen. John Vasconcellos, a Democrat from Santa Clara, hit town with a governor named Reagan. Republican colleague Ross Johnson of Irvine arrived in 1978 with Proposition 13. Senate leader John Burton of San Francisco brought his irascible liberalism to Sacramento in 1964, a few years before his current counterpart in the Assembly leadership was born. Byron Sher, a Democratic senator from Stanford, launched his nearly quarter-century in the Legislature the year Arnold Schwarzenegger starred in “Conan the Barbarian.”

As they exit, the final verdict on term limits awaits.

There is no doubt that the law, which restricts senators to a pair of four-year terms and Assembly members to a trio of two-year stints, produced a statehouse more diverse in gender, ethnicity and professional background. The Legislature now looks “more like California,” said Wayne Johnson, a GOP consultant and early participant in drafting the law. By limiting Capitol careers, he added, the state has blazed “a shorter path to real-time democracy.”

But the plethora of forced evictions also produced two houses churning with greenhorns more captive to wily lobbyists and political consultants, said Larry Gerston, a San Jose State political scientist. Lawmakers are more intent on raising funds for the next election and promoting quick-hit legislation than tackling daunting issues, Gerston argues.

“There’s no institutional memory, no sense of collegiality, little understanding of the political process,” he said.

Since voters approved the law in 1990, plenty of termed-out lawmakers have departed Sacramento with little fanfare, their absences hardly conspicuous. But there exists in the normally cynical statehouse a sense that something important will be lost with the looming exodus of the four big veterans.

Over the years, Sher, 76, developed a command of environmental issues. The iconoclastic Vasconcellos, known for his quirky 1980s self-esteem crusade lampooned in the comic strip “Doonesbury,” became a whiz on the budget and education. Ross Johnson served long stints as Republican leader in both houses, bringing a flushed sincerity to his impassioned floor jousts with the Capitol’s liberal majority.

The 71-year-old Burton, the pugnacious and frequently profane president pro tempore of the Senate, is probably the last of his kind. He served three decades in one elected office or another before winning the Senate’s top post in 1998. Compare that to today’s Assembly, which in February named 37-year-old freshman Fabian Nunez (D-Los Angeles) as speaker.

Burton’s departure in particular is expected to throw more power to Schwarzenegger, who has proved masterful at getting his way since October’s historic recall.

“I think the Legislature is at a bit of a disadvantage,” said Jack Pitney, a Claremont McKenna College political science professor. “The successors to people like John Burton aren’t even in the same league as Schwarzenegger.”

Though the four veterans will go out amid toasts and fetes, their tenures have rarely been tranquil in recent years. With the rest of the Legislature, they each supported electrical deregulation, a decision that helped usher in the power crisis. The three Democrats showed little spending restraint during California’s go-go late 1990s, as the dot-com boom poured tax dollars into the state’s coffers.

When the bust came, they produced no bold ideas to solve the state’s fiscal dilemma, said Tony Quinn, a political commentator and former Republican legislative staffer.

“Even though they’ve been around a long time, none of them have shown any particular insight into how to get us out of these problems,” he said.

Each has a straight shooter’s reputation and has mostly avoided serious political scandal, though Burton has had his knuckles rapped on occasion.

In 2001, the Senate leader acknowledged news reports that he received shares of a Wisconsin casino in exchange for political advice. Burton, who helped open up California to Indian gaming, gave the stock back.

A year earlier, he outraged campaign finance reformers by supporting Proposition 34, considered by foes a political trick meant to block stricter spending controls.

Burton helped quietly put the measure on the ballot during the waning hours of the legislative session, then kept foes like the League of Women Voters from writing the ballot argument against it.

Bob Stern, president of the Center for Governmental Studies, called Burton’s actions “a black mark on an otherwise excellent career.”

Politics’ ugly underbelly prompted term limits in the first place. The law landed amid a growing belief among voters that workaday lawmakers had grown too cozy with special interests. Longtime Speaker Willie Brown, the self-proclaimed “ayatollah of the Assembly,” came to embody what appeared to ail Sacramento. An FBI sting in the late 1980s landed several of his contemporaries behind bars.

“The old system let people sometimes stay too long for the public good,” said Patrick Johnston, a Democratic senator turned lobbyist. “Not because they got old and cranky, but sometimes because they got old and corrupt.”

Like many ideas that sprout in California, legislative term limits spread fast; 20 other states adopted variations, and eight of America’s 10 most populous cities followed suit.

But of late the movement has slumped a bit. Since 1998, only Nebraska has approved limits, and Mississippi voters rejected the idea outright, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Six other states tossed out limits.

In California the concept has stayed afloat in the 14 years since approval. Though it squeaked by with 52% of the vote, subsequent attempts to tweak the law, most recently on the 2002 ballot, have been roundly rejected.

To this day, the notion of a truncated career remains understandably unpopular among many politicians. Even some conservatives believe that legislative terms ought to be lengthened so house leaders can gain more experience (former Gov. George Deukmejian, for instance, advocates a boost to a 12-year limit for each house).

This year term limits will boot 18 members of the Assembly and nine senators, including the four graybeards. Among the younger crowd heading toward statehouse extinction is Jim Brulte (R-Rancho Cucamonga), who recently stepped down as Senate GOP leader after having had a hand in nearly every major legislative initiative and budget battle of the last decade.

“Mentoring and seasoning and hewing of rough edges -- there’s not time for any of that anymore,” lamented Vasconcellos. Before term limits, “there was a sense of being a family, a need to get along even though we disagreed on almost everything. There’s none of that anymore.”

During his 38 years in the Capitol, Vasconcellos has evolved from a button-down newcomer to a 72-year-old vet who sometimes draws snickers over his quixotic causes, among them this year’s proposal to drop the voting age to 14.

“He hasn’t been outside the Capitol since the Lyndon Johnson administration,” groused Dan Schnur, a GOP consultant. “His entire world is defined by what he hears from lobbyists, staffers, old friends and cronies. A newer member with precisely the same ideology is going to have a better sense of what’s relevant for California in the 21st century.”

Despite the lava-lamp persona, Vasconcellos still wields a command of statutory detail and a passion for problem solving.

A couple of years back, aides phoned Vasconcellos at his Maui condominium over a prickly crisis. A local community college hadn’t followed proper hiring procedures in selecting a new chancellor, and state education officials, frozen out and feeling offended, were threatening lawsuits to reverse the move.

After decades on various education committees, Vasconcellos has acquaintances aplenty -- from kindergarten teachers to university presidents. So, perched on the condo’s third-floor balcony, the senator called across the ocean to all the players. He soothed nerves, defused a tense situation. The threatened lawsuits evaporated.

Sher’s tenure has been marked by a singular command of environmental issues. A former Stanford Law School professor with a keen mind and soft voice, he has pushed bills that helped propel national trends in the regulation of air pollution, water quality, renewable energy and recycling, toxic waste, wetlands protection and forestry.

That record prompts gushing tributes among Sher stalwarts.

“He is the greatest environmental legislator in the history of either the state or federal government,” said V. John White, a longtime Sierra Club lobbyist.

But Sher also has critics. Quinn, on the right, blames Sher’s zealous environmental schemes for helping sully the state’s business climate and sending companies fleeing.

On the left, Sher earns barbs for sometimes bowing to compromise. The senator disappointed some friends last year by buckling to pressure from Silicon Valley on a disposal program for castaway computer monitors, said Ted Smith, executive director of the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition. “The pragmatic side of Bryon said something was better than nothing.”

Compared to the courtly Sher, Burton is a mercurial presence in the Capitol, a walking expletive with no deletion.

Since his 1960s ideological jousts with Ronald Reagan, Burton has displayed an abiding love of the underdog. Be it labor, the underprivileged, the aged, the blind, the disabled or civil rights, Burton’s stance is clear and unshaken, said Phil Isenberg, a former Democratic Assembly colleague.

“When he has one of his big, volcanic temper tantrums, it’s almost always for real things that almost no one else is defending,” Isenberg said.

During the 1999 effort to save the majestic Headwaters forest, Burton proved as tough a pugilist as the meanest kid back in his old San Francisco neighborhood. A deadline looming, he faced off with Charles Hurwitz, the legendary corporate raider whose purchase of the ancient redwood forest outraged North Coast environmentalists.

“Hurwitz tried to bully and intimidate and threaten Burton,” recalled White of the Sierra Club. “But he couldn’t have played it more wrong. Burton stared him down and didn’t budge.”

Burton shares virtually no ideological DNA with Johnson. But the two are among the most enduring buddies in the Legislature -- joking on the Senate floor, cooperating during legislative crunch time. Theirs is the sort of oddball friendship that won’t come so easily with term limits. Such bipartisan bonds, and the trust that goes with them, are invaluable in forging budget compromises and hammering out legislative deals.

“It’s damn easy,” Johnson reasons, “to dismiss people you disagree with if you don’t know them as human beings.”

Johnson, 64, arrived in Sacramento with a group of tax-cutting Republicans deemed so conservative that Democrats dubbed them “the Cavemen.”

His beliefs haven’t changed much, but the Capitol has. Among those fleeing with invaluable institutional knowledge have been longtime legislative staffers and committee consultants, many of them experts in their field.

New-breed lawmakers seem more intent on quick statutory victories and news releases that draw attention than laboring over more intractable problems. Johnson notes among his proudest achievements the 15 years he worked to acquire land for an Orange County regional park.

“In today’s Legislature,” he said, “there’s not an opportunity to come back to take another bite at the apple.”

Now as Johnson and Burton and the rest of the termed-out class of 2004 prepare to depart, some colleagues admit to growing nostalgic. Whatever the final assessment of term limits, it is clear the old political game has run its course. The last of the old guard is taking with it the sort of experience and institutional knowledge you don’t get from a book.

“Our rearview mirror is foggy now,” said state Sen. Don Perata (D-Oakland). “You can’t create a future without a sense of the past. And a big part of that past is heading out the door.”