Free Republic

It’s always good to end a week on a high note. Here’s a high note, to be sure: A constitutional amendment to switch California’s Legislature to a part-time body meeting about three months a year is proposed. ... You can pretty much trace the state’s problems to the four-decade history of its full-time Legislature. Coincidence? I think not.

SACRAMENTO - Secretary of State Debra Bowen today announced that the proponent of a new initiative may begin collecting petition signatures for her measure. The Attorney General prepares the legal title and summary that is required to appear on initiative petitions. When the official language is comp lete, the Attorney General forwards it to the proponent and to the Secretary of State. The Secretary of State then provides calendar deadlines to the proponent and to county elections officials, and the initiative may be circulated for signatures. The Attorney General's official title and summary for the measure is as follows: PART-TIME...

Peter Detwiler may have too much spare time on his hands, but thanks to him, we are being given new evidence that California's legislative process is badly broken. Detwiler, a veteran legislative staffer, has compiled data on legislative output for the past four decades, dating back to Ronald Reagan's first year as governor, revealing that over time, the Legislature's production of bills has been dropping dramatically, and growing proportions of measures are being rejected by governors. In theory, the Legislature and the governor exist to address issues arising out of the state's changing economic and social circumstances. If, for example,...

OAKLAND - Assemblywoman Wilma Chan wants her old job back. Trouble is, her protégé, Alameda County Supervisor Alice Lai-Bitker, doesn't want to give it up. With the election still 16 months away, Chan's intention to return to the county seat she held from 1994 to 2000 has sparked an unusually sharp level of speculation and political posturing. It also is a tangible example of the fallout from Legislative term limits as politicians look around for new -- or old -- jobs. For her part, Chan sees returning to her East Bay constituency as a political homecoming that would allow Alameda...

<p>LOS ANGELES (AP) - State lawmakers should work part time so they would be more productive and less likely to write "strange bills," Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger told a reporter during a family vacation in Hawaii.</p> <p>"I want to make the Legislature a part-time Legislature," he said Tuesday. "Spending so much time in Sacramento, without anything to do, then out of that comes strange bills.</p>

<p>Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has come up with the best reform proposal we've heard in years: return to a part-time Legislature. In 1966, the state switched to a full-time Legislature, supposedly because our state was so complex it needed the full-time attention of politicians.</p>

<p>Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, lounging in Hawaii on spring break with his wife and kids, tells a reporter that state lawmakers should follow his lead and take more time off. The Legislature, he says, "doesn't have enough to do." Their full-time status in Sacramento simply gives them too much time to make mischief.</p>

SACRAMENTO (AP) - They earn $99,000 a year to eye 5,000 bills and resolutions on every subject from transit to stem cell research to Bob Hope Day. But now Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is sparking a bigger fire beneath their seats, saying California lawmakers should work part-time like their 7,300 colleagues in most other states. Some analysts say the governor's suggestion is worthy of new debate 38 years after Californians created one of the nation's few full-time legislatures. "I came around to supporting it at the time," recalls former Assembly Speaker Robert T. Monagan, now 83. "But as it turned out...