Everyone gets a shot

California held a recall election. Voters kicked out an incumbent governor and sent a movie action hero to Sacramento. He promised to “blow up the boxes” in which state government is trapped. Reform was his central theme.

That was a while back. Since then, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has stumbled badly in his government reform effort.

All four of the reform measures he endorsed in last month's special election failed miserably. Instead of blowing up the boxes, Schwarzenegger seems to have become trapped in one.

Many think true reform is only a pipe dream, that it can't happen because California has a political inertia too powerful, engrained and institutionalized to overcome. The political fortresses have been built over generations and just about any effort to break down the walls is doomed to fail.

Assemblymen Joe Canciamilla and Keith Richman don't buy that argument. They're have a bill to introduce in the next session of the Legislature that would create a “citizens' assembly,” a sort of parallel legislative body to bring fresh ideas about government reform.

Here's how it would work:

The names of 200 citizens from the state's 80 legislative districts would be randomly selected. Those 16,000 folks would be invited to town hall-type meetings to learn what would be expected of them. Of those who remain in the pool, a man and a woman from each district would be selected - again, by random drawings - and those 160 citizens would meet two weekends a month for a year to figure out how to break the political logjam in Sacramento. They'd be asked to come up with solutions to problems associated with drawing legislative boundaries, term limits and campaign fund-raising. No one with any political connections would be allowed into the group.

The suggestions would then be turned over to the regular Legislature, whose members could either accept or reject the proposals. Sounds like the Legislature would thus keep its stranglehold, right? Not exactly. If the citizens' group's ideas don't fly, the group could bypass the Legislature and go directly to voters, via the initiative process.

Such an assembly could make the regular Legislature somewhat redundant, a possibility that cannot have escaped the attention of elected lawmakers, who are unlikely to vote for such a bill.

In which case, Canciamilla and Richman are preparing their idea as a ballot initiative, that could be on the ballot as early as next fall.

Politics can be so circular.

December 29, 2005