Anyone interested in the potential problems of a part-time Legislature should take a look at the bust of former San Francisco Mayor John Shelley, just inside the main entrance at City Hall.
The words carved into the stone call Shelley “A True Representative of the People,” and list his single term as mayor from 1964-68, his seven terms in Congress and his service in the state Senate from 1939 to 1946.
Since those were the years of a part-time Legislature, it also lists his full-time job as president of the San Francisco Labor Council from 1937 to 1948. After he left the Legislature, Shelley was president of the California State Federation of Labor until he was elected to Congress.
So you have a state legislator who at the same time was drawing a full-time salary as one of California’s most powerful labor leaders.
Anyone see the potential for conflict there?
Multiply that by the 120 legislators who will be holding other full-time jobs as “citizen legislators” and the potential for mischief grows accordingly.
If you believe the folks who are pushing to return California to the part-time (90 days in session each year, max) Legislature it had before 1966, the change will solve all the state’s problems.
“A part-time Legislature will replace professional politicians with citizen legislators and will break the stranglehold of special interests,” according to the language of the proposed initiative that would go on a ballot next year if it collects the needed signatures.
Supporters, many of them conservative Republicans who don’t much like government anyway, argue that professional politicians are the state’s real problem.
“A part-time Legislature would end the power of career politicians,” state Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner said in a telephone interview with reporters earlier this month. “It would bring people from the trenches into the Legislature. We would see business people, bus drivers, teachers and others go to Sacramento for a term and then return home.”
It should be noted that Poizner, a Republican, is running for governor and is not proposing that job become part-time.
But who exactly are these people who will be able to take off the months of January, May and June and move right back to their regular jobs. Teachers are in the classroom, bus drivers are on their routes and most people with workaday jobs are expected to at their desks or in their shops, making a living.
Union officials, though, usually are pretty flexible, as are lobbyists, business association leaders, lawyers, retired folks and people with enough money that they don’t need to hold down a full-time job. That doesn’t exactly make for a balanced representation of the state, however.
And people who think that the days of the part-time Legislature were some Golden Era of pristine politics, joyfully free of special interest influence, should read a bit more California history (See especially: Railroad, Southern Pacific, and Samish, Artie)
Part-time legislators will have to run for office just as often as the current full-time ones and TV stations and the Post Office — not to mention political consultants — aren’t going to slash their rates just because the new legislative jobs won’t pay as much. If people still want to get elected to office (Hint: They will), it’s going to cost money, which will be raised, then as now, with the help of those despised special interests.
With the state’s finances in the dumper and the Legislature seemingly more interested in scoring political points than in actually solving California’s problems, it’s no surprise that people are talking about trying something different, figuring that whatever happens at least can’t be any worse.
Don’t be so sure. The capital will still be filled with lobbyists, legislative staffers, political appointees and the governor and his minions, all of them working full-time and more than willing to fill the vacuum of power left by legislators who will spend most of the year at home, working at their other jobs. For all its faults, the Legislature is made up of members representing every part of the state. If the balance of political power swings away from them, California’s political scene will be very different. That’s different, not necessarily better.
John Wildermuth is a longtime writer on California politics.