[heleny]

I'd like to see a unicameral legislature of 100 members. Fewer politicians, no duplication, and the districts would actually be smaller, and thus more responsive, than the current districts in the 80-member Assembly or 40-member Senate. Also, it takes the political process out of the (inherently unaccountable) conference committee and moves it into the open forum of the legislative floor.

I think I'd go for it, too, provided the districts aren't gerrymandered too much.

In the US Congress, the Senators represent states, so it seems that an improvement to the bicameral legislature would be if we had 58 State Senators, each representing one of the 58 counties. As the CA legislature is now, it seems that the state Senate duplicates the Assembly.

[only1percent]

California had a system of county representation for most of the 19th and 20th century, but it (together with all such systems) was invalidated by Baker v. Carr in the early 1960s, which held that any district system had to have an approximately even resident-to-represenative ratio. The only exception was the U.S. Senate, which being expressly provided for in the Constitution could not be ruled unconstitutional.

State Senates in many places are not entirely duplicative. In some states, the Senate has significantly more power than the Assembly/State House of Representatives (not really the case in California). In other states there's a massively smaller number of Senators than members of the lower house, so in theory there should be a qualitatively different character to the debate, professionalism of the members, immunity from highly parochial interests, etc. In California is a 1:2 ratio of Senators to Asembly members, so that doesn't apply either.