Fixing California. Part 1: The Constitution and the Legislature

California is broken, and I have figured out how to fix it.  See below for the first installment in my presription.  This has nothing to do with photography, or software, or any of the things I usually write about here, but I have been thinking about this a lot in the last few months, and finally decided that I couldn't hold my tongue any longer... 

Before I get going, though, a word about why I care so much about California.  You might reasonably, ask, if I think California is broken, why not pack up and leave?  Go somewhere else?  Well, there are some practical problems with that.  Most other places in the United States, and indeed in the world, are unappealing to me for other reasons, most importantly related to weather.  Leaving the weather aside, however, California is still one of the greatest places in the world, not just because of its fantastic physical endowments, including mountains, deserts, coastlines, agricultural land, forests and so forth, but also because of its people, who have come from all over the United States, and indeed all over the world, to make a better life for themselves, and in the process, have made California, at least Los Angeles, the most exciting, diverse, and cosmopolitan place in the world. 

Here goes...

Reboot the state government with a new constitution 

The state government needs to be fixed.  The problem is not the individuals who make up the government, either by serving in the legislature or leading our state agencies.  Many of them, probably most of them, are serious and talented people who want to do right by the people of California.  I suspect that many of them could make more money and suffer less public abuse by doing something other than what they are doing, and I am grateful that they are there trying.  Unfortunately, though, the system in which everyone operates now seems to have evolved into something where nobody can do anything.  Thus even though we have lots of capable and well-meaning people in Sacramento, we have reverse synergy, and the whole is substantially less than the sum of the parts.

Let's tear up the state constitution and write a new one, hopefully one that is much shorter, simpler, and more difficult to amend.  There is talk of a constitutional convention and I hope that happens.  Based on the experience of the recent decades, I think an important guiding principle for writing the constitution is that it should set out the basic principles by which the state should be governed over the long term, and not try to address specific current and probably short-term concerns that may be irrelevant in a few decades.  I am really concerned that a constitutional convention will turn into a free for all where dozens or hundreds of special interests will try to have their pet concerns written in as clauses.  In that case, we will end up with a constitution hundreds of pages long that is an incoherent pastiche of mandates, restrictions, caps, and limits that reflect various parochial interests.  The new constitution should be a minimalist one that establishes a small number of basic principles by which laws are made, officials are elected, and so forth.  It should leave the handling of specific issues and situations to the legislature and the courts.  And it should be very, very difficult to amend.

I favor minimalism in the new state constitution because I think that the notion we can solve our problems by having some sort of exhaustive, all-encompassing constitution that addresses dozens or hundreds of specific pet issues by binding the hands of elected officials is delusional.  Indeed, it is the idea that we can solve our problems with more and more limits, mandates, caps and restrictions on the activities of the legislature and state government that led us into our current mess.  It also represents an abdication of responsibility on the part of voters.

Legislature and state government


Basically, I would like to see a clean and simple unicameral system for the state.   As I envision it, the state government would be organized like a provincial government in Canada.  The legislature would essentially be a parliament, with a governor selected from whichever party or coalition of parties holds a majority.

The current system of a separately elected governor and bicameral legislature was intended as part of a system of checks and balances, but increasingly I think it is archaic and somewhat mindless imitation of the federal system.  Most disturbingly, the current system has morphed into one in which no party, and no single individual, seems to be responsible or accountable for the successful or failure of anything.   In other words, it has become a device for evading Now whenever something falls apart, each party can tell its supporters that it was the other party's fault, and nothing happens.  Indeed the current system seems to reward obstructionism.

A state parliament with a governor selected from the majority party would clarify responsibility and improve accountability.  If one party was in office and botched everything, they wouldn't be able to pin the blame on another party.  And if they succeeded, they would get the credit, and the voters might give them another chance.  The voters could throw them out in the next election and give the other party a try.  Basically a party that is put into office has to put its money where its mouth is, so to speak, and deliver the goods while they are in control, because they can't fall back on claiming that they were obstructed by the other party.  The current system in which in effective legislators or governor can be reelected again and again by claiming that their party was trying to do good but was obstructed by the other parties would be eliminated.

Along these lines, I would abolish most if not all statewide elected offices.  The governor would have the equivalent of a cabinet that would include agency heads and equivalents of the current elected officials.  This makes whichever party holds office solely responsible for success or failure in governing.  If the voters don't like what is happening, there is no ambiguity about who deserves to be blamed, and who should be thrown out of office at the next election.  And if things are going well, the governing party can get the credit.

We should also eliminate all term limits, except perhaps some sort of cap on length of service for the governor.  Term limits in the state government are silly.  If voters don't like the job that an elected official is doing, they have a responsibility to vote them out, or live with the consequences.  Frankly, I think term limits are an abdication of responsibility, and have contributed a great deal to the mess we are in now.   A parliamentary system along the lines I outlined above would ensure turnover because voters would be choosing their legislator and governor at the same time.  An unpopular governor would drag down legislators with him because voters upset with his or her performance would have to vote against their local legislator.

As in most parliamentary systems, of course, the option would exist to bring down a government by a vote of no-confidence.  If the legislators from a majority party decided that the governor was leading them over a cliff, they have a vote of no confidence, and government would fall, and there would be new elections.


A key principle in the drawing of boundaries for legislative districts should be that internal heterogeneity should be maximized, not minimized.  Basically the goal should be to make every district as representative as possible of the state, or at least its region, so that every election is competitive, and a successful candidate has to assemble a coalition of voters from a variety of groups.  This would push candidates toward the center, and favor candidates who could appeal to a broad spectrum of voters.  I haven't thought this through, but one approach might be to randomize the drawing of boundaries. Rather than try to find some deterministic algorithm that draw boundaries that maximize conformity to some present criteria, and thereby reify some notion of what the key groups to be balanced are, maybe there is a way of redrawing boundaries through some kind of random process every ten years.  Of course districts would need to be compact, i.e. you would have to be able to reach any point in the district from any other point in the district without leaving the district.  While by luck of the draw individual districts might be skewed toward one demographic or another, overall there would be fewer safe seats for either party, and elected officials would need to be more attuned to the concerns of the center.

Right now it seems that district boundaries are drawn to maximize internal heterogeneity, and thereby create safe seats for specific parties.  This ends up making party primaries more important than the actual elections.  For both parties, this results in the election of extremists who seek to satisfy their base and thereby survive the primary. 

Stay tuned.  Now that I have sorted out the constitution and legislature, I will move on to state finances, education, and infrastructure.