CA: Term-limit deal details are devilish

www.dailynews.com ^ | 07/23/2006 | Jill Stewart

[calcowgirl]

EVERY few years, California lawmakers take aim at term limits, which have swept out the Sacramento fossils who held office for decades, ushering in fresh faces and more minorities.

Legislators hate term limits. They want to cling to six-figure jobs, full staffs, fat per diem expense accounts and personal prestige that few lawmakers could ever earn in private life.

Journalists who cover politics hate term limits. They must cozy up to a new bunch of lawmakers every time the old bunch is forced out. They have to develop new sources and — horrors! — update their Rolodexes.

Both the pols and the media hate term limits. I love them — and so do most Californians.

Voters know that if a legislator turns out to be foolish, nasty or corrupt, he or she will be forced out even if voters aren't paying close attention, which they rarely are. It's a self-cleaning system. Switch on the law, and the yahoos are swept out after a reasonable interval.

It doesn't work perfectly. State assembly members are termed out after six years, so after about four years they start ignoring their duties and running for state Senate. Senate members are termed out after eight years, so after about six years they start ignoring their duties and running for Assembly.

Everybody calls this “musical chairs.” But the truth is, scores of ossified politicians elected back in the days of Elvis Presley or “Laugh In” are now blessedly gone.

Critics complain that term limits are to blame for legislative dysfunction and the “loss of institutional memory.” Wrong again. The oldsters, not the newcomers, created our workers' compensation disaster, passing foolish laws over a 20-year period. The oldsters, not the newcomers, spent three decades starving the infrastructure and shifting taxpayer money into social welfare. And so on.

Institutional memory? We're demonstrably better off without it.

Even so, term limits are under attack again. And for the first time, I'll admit I am horribly torn. Not by the Los Angeles City Council's embarrassing effort to give itself another four years in office, linked to utterly fake “ethics reforms.”

I'm torn over Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's idea that, if approved by voters, would lengthen legislative term limits to 12 years in the Assembly or Senate.

As part of the deal with legislators, if Arnold backs watered-down term limits, legislators must put before voters SCA3 — a constitutional amendment that, if fixed before a late-August deadline, might end the scandal of gerrymandering, wherein Republican and Democratic legislators create rigged voting districts that ignore geography to protect their own safe seats.

How ironic that California is now like Mexico, before Mexico set up a truly independent election tribunal to end rigged elections.

In 2005, Common Cause urged California to use a truly independent panel to draw up voting districts. Common Cause found that in the 1990s, when an independent panel did the job, “competitive races increased by more than 50 percent.”

Sadly, SCA3 fails to do this as currently written. It contains a provision that lets a handful of legislative leaders appoint eight of the 11 “independent” panelists, to be selected from a 50-person pool of 19 Democrats, 19 Republicans, and 12 unaffiliated or lesser-party Californians named by a group of retired judges.

My prediction: Democratic leaders will pick four hard-core Democrats; Republican leaders will pick four hard-core Republicans. The three remaining spots are to be chosen by these eight. Almost certainly, the eight will collude to ensure that two spots go to hard-core partisans of each party. Then the parties will war over the tie-breaking 11th panelist.

In California, 33 percent of voters are either “decline to state” or belong to a lesser party. Yet under SCA3, the two big parties will control 10 of 11 spots.

Outrageous.

We've seen a similarly bogus “independent” commission — the Citizens Compensation Commission — grant our Legislature the highest salaries in the U.S.

Arnold is offering a nifty incentive to legislators to give up their gerrymandering ways — 12-year term limits. But if he really wants things to change, he must give voters a nifty incentive, not another bogus independent panel.

Jill Stewart is a print, radio and television commentator on California politics. Contact her via her Web site, www.jillstewart.net.