Would a part time legislature lead to fewer initiatives?
I ask this question after pulling out an op-ed I had published in the Sacramento Bee over twenty years ago. In defending the initiative process in that piece, I wrote:
“The initiative remained popular with California voters in the 1920s and 1930s but slowly disappeared from common use. However, initiatives as an expression of voters’ frustrations came back in the 1970s – not coincidentally, soon after Californians approved a full-time legislature.”
What sent me digging into old files were observations made by Sacramento Bee political columnist Dan Walters at the recent constitutional convention town hall in Orange County last week. Walters argued that the 1966 reform, which created a full time legislature, did not bring the promised improvements in governance supporters across the political spectrum predicted at the time.
Walters said the full time legislature lured professional politicians, mostly legislative staffers that followed the boss into office. Then came Proposition 13, which moved power to Sacramento, said Walters. Now the newly empowered politicians played more politics than policy. Other potentially explosive political actions such as collective bargaining for public employees took root in the 1970s.
As Walters pointed out, we’re still fighting over a number of those 1970s issues today. And, soon, he noted with a touch of irony, the 1970s governor who was there at the beginning of those battles may be governor again.
Which made me think about my long ago argument that you could graph the rise of the initiative process to the full time legislature. Consider what such a graph would look like. In the 1960s, under the part time legislature, only 9 citizen initiatives qualified for the ballot. In the 1970s that number jumped to 22 as the full time legislature took hold although many of the legislators from the part time legislature days still served in office. By the 1980s, the full time legislature was in control of California’s governance and 46 initiatives were on the ballot. The 1990s saw a jump to 61 measures. The first decade of the new century has already seen 60 measures on the ballot.
Which begs the question, if a forty year decline in governance followed in the wake of the full time legislature, would a part time legislature return California to a productive government?
Efforts to create variations of a part time legislature are working there way into the public arena. Gabriella Holt and Citizens for California Reform are currently circulating initiative petitions to bring back a part time legislature. California Forward has put forth the idea that legislators should spend half the year in their districts while maintaining their full legislative salaries.
So, while the battles of the 1970s rage on, perhaps a key to reform is to step back one more decade and re-engage a debate from the 1960s over whether a part time or full time legislature is best for California.