Legislation slow on small issues, too
Much has been made in the media – certainly in this column – and in civic and academic circles about the California Legislature’s wheel-spinning on the budget, water, education and other high-profile issues. A growing public perception of political dysfunction is fueling drives for a fundamental overhaul, including a proposed constitutional convention. The stasis on smaller matters is less understood. Year after year, session after session, governor after governor, more than 1,000 lobbyists do battle on countless issues important to their clients. Mostly, these duels end in draws.
The Capitol’s gridlock is so pervasive that the actual volume of legislation has continued to decline year after year. This year, for instance, the Legislature sent just 872 bills to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s desk, the lowest in the four decades for which veteran legislative staffer Peter Detwiler has compiled data, scarcely half the number that Ronald Reagan received in 1967, the first year of his governorship.
At the same time, governors have been rejecting ever-greater proportions of those bills. Reagan vetoed just 83 in 1967, while Schwarzenegger has rejected more than 35 percent of those he’s received during his six-year governorship.
The lack of legislative production reflects, one could argue, the Capitol’s ever-widening ideological divide. The Legislature is almost entirely composed of very liberal Democrats and very conservative Republicans, thanks to term limits and gerrymandered legislative districts.
However, most of the bills that make their way through the Capitol each year require only simple majority votes, so in theory, there’s nothing to prevent the majority Democrats from flooding the governor. But they seem steadily less inclined to do so, perhaps because they know that Republican Schwarzenegger is not hesitant to reject bills he doesn’t like, or perhaps the perpetual budget crisis has put the hammer on bills that expand government.
The best example of the Capitol’s wheel-spinning is the annual jousting over so-called “job killer” bills. Environmentalists, consumer activists, personal injury attorneys and labor unions each year submit hundreds of bills that business groups oppose while singling out a few dozen as “job killers.”
In the past, many of them would reach the governor’s desk, but all but a handful would be vetoed. Even Democrat Gray Davis was often reluctant to sign business-opposed measures, but Schwarzenegger has been especially hostile, although he has occasionally signed a measure backed by environmentalists.
A curious thing happened this year. The state Chamber of Commerce issued its usual list of 33 “job killers,” but just six of them got to Schwarzenegger, the lowest number he’d ever seen, and he rejected all six of them.
Perhaps, with recession clobbering the state, even liberal Democrats were hesitant this year to be seen as damaging the business climate.
E-mail Dan Walters at dwalters@sacbee.com. Back columns, www.sacbee.com/walters. Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.