Legislative serendipity
I think it was Otto von Bismarck who said, “Laws are like sausages. It’s better not to see them being made.” He said it well more than a century ago and he was right on. I’m here to report that, in the ensuing century, nothing has changed.
Last week, I was up in Sacramento for the end of the legislative session. In the last couple of days of the session, legislators were amending bills and moving them through so quickly that people were voting on bills before they had even seen the wording of them. Despite this apparent chaos, all in all, it was a very productive session, and a number of very significant pieces of legislation were passed.
Our legislators raised the minimum wage to $8 per hour (which hadn’t been raised in years), attacked global warming with an emissions control bill (kudos to Speaker Fabian Nuñez and our Assemblymember Fran Pavley), lowered the cost of drugs for the poor and the uninsured, and allowed the phone companies to get into the cable business (hopefully generating some rate competition). Earlier they put $40,000,000 of infrastructure bonds covering transportation, schools, levee construction and repair, and housing, among other things, onto the November ballot for our vote.
How did it all happen? How did we turn from a system that’s been in gridlock for years to one that’s actually doing what it is paid to do-that is, legislate?
It was a combination of factors-including money, luck and electoral politics.
First and foremost, our governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, has got to be the comeback kid of the year. After the last election when we voters turned down every one of his ballot propositions, his popularity was, to put it gently, in the toilet. His pundits were writing his political obituaries. There was no “there, there,” they said. Well, I’m here to report that the critics were wrong. If the governor is anything, he’s a pragmatist. If something doesn’t work, he gets rid of it and tries another approach.
First, he changed his team. He brought in new people, appointed a Democrat as his chief of staff and, in a very calculated way, moved toward the center. In California, which is a Blue state with a Democratic-controlled Legislature, a Republican governor can’t afford to be a purist, at least not if he intends to be effective. Schwarzenegger obviously understood this and, despite some opposition from the purists in his own party, he moved back toward the center.
Then he had to neutralize the people who killed his ballot propositions: the nurses, the teachers, the police, the firemen and the prison guards. This is where luck came into it. The economy was good; in fact, it was very good. Money rolled into the state treasury and the governor had goodies to distribute. Once he did that, it took the sting out of the opposition.
Next, he had to work a series of deals with the legislative leadership. Now theoretically, the Democratic leadership is behind the Democratic standard bearer, State Treasurer Phil Angelides, so you might think they wouldn’t want to do anything that might make the governor look good, but that wasn’t the case. After the last election the governor was very unpopular, but the Legislature was even more unpopular and the leadership, Speaker Fabian Nuñez and Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata, were resolved to change the public perception that they were a gigantic waste of time and the people’s money. In order to do that, they had to work with the governor and do their jobs, which is to legislate and stop passing all the tough calls through to the voters via the ballot propositions.
Also, Angelides doesn’t seem to generate a strong sense of loyalty among the others, and, although no one will say so in public, many wouldn’t be heartbroken if he went down to defeat in November. Besides, it’s been said that Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has his eye on the governor’s chair in 2010, when Schwarzenegger would be termed out, and Nuñez is supposedly interested in taking his spot as mayor of Los Angeles. So, even though Nuñez is on the Angelides campaign team, there are going to be a number of photo ops soon where he will be standing next to the governor, beaming, while the governor signs all these new bills, which, I suspect, is not going to do the Angelides gubernatorial campaign much good. If that isn’t enough, a great deal of the state Democratic leadership is also going to be out with the governor stumping for the passage of the $40,000,000 infrastructure bonds. I think Angelides has his work cut out for him.
I guess, like any legislative session, there is that strange combination of desire, luck and serendipity that makes legislation. And this year saw it all.