The Problem with Representative Democracy

Legislators are renowned for their varied interests….or short attention spans, depending on your point of view. The members with IQs above bathwater and/or with ambitions for higher office could be particularly challenging in this regard. Senator Jack Chupacabra was not unique in this respect. Despite the continuing pleas of Chief of Staff Botticelli for the Senator to narrow his focus, his interests were varied, and so long as rules allowed him to introduce thirty bills, thirty bills he would introduce! 

Energy portfolio standards, early childcare education, campaign finance reform, and small claims court, would all grab his interest during his tenure in the Senate. He even asked his constituents what bills they would like introduced, creating a massive workload, from which his beleaguered staff were annually instructed to select the best (least weird). If one were to be honest, while most of the proposals were absurd, impossible, illegal, or outrageously expensive, an occasional gem would on occasion emerge. Ahhh, representative democracy, what a concept!

The problem, as Botticelli tirelessly explained to the peripatetic Senator, was that there were forty Senators and eighty Assembly members. If every member introduced the maximum amount of legislation allowed, there would be thirty-six hundred bills to consider for every two-year session. 

If there are twenty good ideas in the bunch in any one year, for the life of me, I could rarely find them. I would regularly observe Coop muttering to himself over the vacuous nature of many of the purported legislative ideas, often answers in search of a defined problem. Since power abhors a vacuum, the breadth of the bill introductions was positively mind-boggling. Most came from lobbyists more interested in proving their value to their paying clients than actually improving life for California’s near 40 million citizens. 

At one point, a former President Pro-Tem of the Senate, at the time, Attorney General, appeared on the Assembly floor and begged the 80 legislators to stop introducing new bills and focus instead on the unglamorous work of evaluating existing programs and determining whether they were effective! But of course, no one listened. To the contrary he was reprimanded and chastised by members of both parties for his break with tradition and lack of decorum for intruding on their sacred legislative duties. Press releases to the district on bills that were introduced with absolutely no chance to ever become law (thank goodness), were viewed as far more worthy of limited legislative time than the difficult and thankless task of government oversight. 

While much of the stuff that the legislators consumed themselves with was at worst irrelevant to the health and wellbeing of those who elected them, the sheer volume of bills could lead to serious mischief as well. As legislators focused sedulously on their individual bill packages, and term limits hollowed out the legislature of experienced members as well as staff, what went missing was program review. It took Botticelli and company six years to convince Chupacabra, by then a budget chair, that more good could be done calling program heads to account for each dollar spent than introducing yet another bill to reform that very program. 

This is how Coop explained it to me. “It is up to Democrats to show the public that they can wisely spend every last tax dollar. Republicans simply want government out of their lives - shrunken so small it can be drowned in a bathtub, to paraphrase one of their leading lights - limited government, or at a minimum, incompetent wasteful government, was an end in itself.”

“Problem is,” he continued, “most Republicans have no idea what government actually does or what life would look like if they accomplished their minimalist goals. One of my favorite lines showing the absurdity of this so-called philosophy was displayed repeatedly on signs held at Tea Party rallies against proposed universal health care.“Get the government’s hands off my Medicare.”

If the price to pay is climate disruption, desperate underpaid workers, and a polluted environment, then so be it, so long as the boys at the top continue to extract profits and wealthy donors can skip out on paying taxes. Republicans maintain power with corporate money and copious amounts of cash from a few wealthy right wing scions hoarding fortunes from a fading past, the sadly legal contributions opaquely agitating ever widening culture wars.

Coop was on a roll. “Any hopes at solidarity among those being screwed in this orgy of greed and venality is increasingly tenuous as the amoral nabobs pulling the strings of this shit show have created a narrative of cultural replacement continually roiling a conservative Christian base convinced their ages old place at the top is under imminent threat by - pick as many as apply - radical feminists, uppity African Americans demanding, oh the horror, equal rights, Latin hordes streaming across the porous southern border, Muslim terrorists (that is, any Muslim), transgender men determined to get access to girls bathrooms, radical greens, and of course, that bugaboo from ancient blood libels, the all-powerful Jews!” 

“They keep this whole thing contaminated through a profit driven siloed conservative media universe where facts rarely intrude! Compared to proving government competence and efficiency, this is child’s play.”

“So long as Democrats in power waste money on outdated programs or simply reward their friends in public labor unions - cops, firefighters, prison guards, the few incompetent teachers, why get involved? Our democracy is in peril,” he continued. ‘The modern Republican party is no longer the party of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, or even John McCain, but rather a cynical, right wing, anti-democratic mob whose goal is to convince people that the government can’t work. Why vote if nothing ever changes?”

“Republicans may take care of their friends at oil companies, coal companies, corporate agriculture, and other preferred business types, but Democrats, to stressed out people trying to get by, have failed to make a persuasive case that higher taxes and more government makes a substantive difference in their lives. That being the case, why support higher taxes? To badly mix metaphors, if the new boss is to be the same as the old boss, but taxes are lower with the devil you know, why change horses?”

Boticcelli, a former Senior Deputy in the Governor’s office of Fiscal Affairs, and with a deep understanding of public finance, pleaded with Chupacabra to no avail.

“Introduce no more than three bills a year, and instead use your budget committee to hold a hearing every other week on a program under your committee’s jurisdiction. 

Prior to the hearing, the program head will be given four questions, always the same, to be addressed at the public meeting.”

“First, what is the mission, or the specific public policy goal that the program is intended to address? Second, what are the metrics used to determine whether the program is meeting those goals? Third, are there other programs in the state that attempt to address the same problem? And fourth, if there are multiple programs addressing the same problem, which is most effective?”

While his chief of staff and senior advisors kept at Pomp to follow this agenda and set an example, they were always met with the same rejoinder: “I am a legislator, and my constituents sent me here to legislate.” Botticelli invariably replied “you are a senator, and as such you can rise above the fray and act senatorial.”

This was met with a harrumph and a dismissive, “Ms. Botticelli, if you continue to argue logic, we have nothing more to discuss!”