Opinion: Turn the California Legislature into a part-time profession
After reading my column last week touting historic preservation of the existing California Capitol Annex rather than the current billion-dollar raze-and-rebuild vanity scheme, a reader challenged me to champion something he probably thought I never would.“How about returning California to a part-time Legislature? The return would be fewer frivolous laws, less office space and a savings to taxpayers. You could champion this in your columns.
But I’ve been for a part-time California Legislature ever since I began writing newspaper columns — which I find by counting on my fingers is 35 years. In making the ridiculously-easy-to-make argument for having citizens with real jobs rather than professional politicians representing us in Sacramento, it’s best to first point to what may be for Californians a startling fact: Our state is among a tiny minority of states that do elect full-timers to serve in the state Capitol.
One of the slightly different counts comes from Indivisible, the liberal activist group: “Believe it or not, only nine states have full-time legislatures — California, Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania, Alaska, Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, Ohio, and Wisconsin. The rest of the states meet part-time with some states like Montana, Nevada, Texas, North Dakota only meeting in odd-numbered years.”
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