It is hard, just hard – forgive me, I’m struggling to keep it together here – when one sees injustice. It’s doubly hard when a whole class of people suffer a loss of democracy, the extinguishing of their voice, because of where they live.
The people of the Bay Area, I have now been informed, are feeling the harsh weight of injustice, the silencing of their voices, the fear of being shut out.
Fortunately, its leaders have somehow managed to raise their voices in protest. Recently, Jim Wunderman of the Bay Area Council wrote to warn of the fact that Southern Californians would soon be leaders of both houses of the state legislature. This broke precedent, and could be a threat to the Bay Area.
For 40 forty years there has been an unspoken – and unbroken – rule that Southern California splits leadership of the legislature with the Bay Area and greater Northern California. This year, Southern California leaders could seize complete control of the state legislature, winning leadership of both the Senate and the Assembly. We respect the importance of Southern California and often work closely with leaders there on key issues, but, for the good of California, we must continue to share leadership.
Northern California’s Senators and Assemblymembers should stand up for their districts, their voters, their region, and this historic balance of power, and ensure that either the next as the next leader of the Senate or the Assembly is from this part of the state. Once we lose that position of power, it’s very difficult to get it back.
This is a threat even a Southern Californian can recognize. Talk about loss of power. With the exception of the state treasurer, insurance commissioner, the attorney general, the lieutenant governor, Gov. Jerry Brown and the California Supreme Court, Northern California is totally shut out of state government.
And in the business world, the powerlessness is even more shocking. For example, there is still some personal data that Facebook and Google don’t yet have. Apple isn’t worth $1 trillion yet and isn’t always the most valuable company in the world; sometimes, when the stock prices change, ExxonMobil become #1. Twitter is cruelly limited to 140 characters per Tweet.
And to think of the legislature dominated by Southern Californians? Imagine all the things they can do. As everyone knows, in California, our legislature enjoys a broad popular mandate to take big actions, and uses that mandate to take on really big, difficult, thorny problems. They don’t get bogged down in gridlock in Sacramento.
Now, of course, there are a few people in this state who think that legislative leaders are really stuck and don’t have all that much power, and that the state constitution is so broken that it should be rewritten, so the legislature can finally do big things. One of those people used to be none other than Jim Wunderman, who proposed a constitutional convention some years ago (and won some praise from me in this space. But he and everyone knows that California has been fixed.
Except for the terrible problem of the under-representation of the Bay Area.