CommentsGELFAND’S WORLD-- (This is another article in a continuing campaign to inform, educate and energize Angelenos on the reformation of city government … explaining the how, the why and the possibilities.)
When I wrote the first of my series of articles on LA governmental reform, I received an inquiry from a fellow CityWatch author. He asked what I thought of the proposed initiative by governor candidate John Cox (photo above). Since I had never heard of the proposal, I didn't answer at the time. Here is my take on an interesting attempt that -- like so many other initiative attempts -- was dropped on the public without advance warning and most importantly, without an attempt to build a consensus among the voters that something like it would be helpful.
The Cox initiative was titled The California neighborhood legislative districts and working groups initiative (2018).
Here are the essential elements:
As previously, the post-Cox government would have a state legislature in which 40 members of the Senate and 80 members of the Assembly would convene in Sacramento and vote on legislation. However, these legislators would be formally known as Working Groups. How the members of the Working Groups would come to be selected is the big difference.
In present day California, the members of the Senate and Assembly are directly elected by the voters. At this time, one senator represents just under a million people. One assemblyman represents just under half a million people.
It takes a lot of money to run for these seats. Successful candidates raise hundreds of thousands -- or even millions -- of dollars in order to run. It should be no surprise that successful candidates are beholden to the donor class. For Republicans, it is business. For Democrats, it is unions.
Because our legislative districts are so big, it isn't surprising that a direct connection between the candidate and the mass of voters is missing. It is simply impossible for any candidate to know any substantial fraction of those he represents or for them to know him. As a result, present day legislative elections in California are battles by professional politicians for donor dollars.
The Cox proposal upends this system. It would do so by dividing each assembly and senatorial district into about 100 smaller districts. For an assembly district, each subdistrict would have about 5000 people. Senatorial subdistricts would have about twice that number. In such a system, it is possible for a non-professional candidate to campaign from door to door. Not only that, but you could run your campaign for a few hundred dollars -- basically the price of printing postcards to give out by hand.
In the Cox system, the elected representatives from these 100 subdistricts get together at the beginning of the term and choose one person to go to Sacramento as a member of the Working Group. (In another country in another century, this practice of having local committees elect the next higher committee was known as a soviet system. It's amusing how this approach was dusted off by a conservative.)
Notice that in practice, the Working Group is the same as the present day Senate or Assembly. Each working group has the same number of voting members. It's just that the Working Groups are selected by the local representatives from among their own number. This is supposed to bring government closer to the people and distance it from those who would buy legislators through campaign donations.
It is clearly a radical proposal, since it would overturn the current system we have of representative government. It would still be representative government, but it would be once-removed from the voters as a whole. You would get to vote for your local representative, but unless you are that representative, you have no direct vote in who goes to Sacramento.
So that's the gist of it. In one fell swoop, the Cox proposal would take the power of big money out of California legislative races. Any of us could carry out a campaign provided we are willing to wear out enough shoe leather.
Two or Three Things We Left Out
There is one element of this proposal that I haven't mentioned as yet. As written, the initiative says that all those representatives at the subdistrict level are also members of the legislature. They would be, officially, the Senate and the Assembly. That makes a Senate of about 4000 members and an Assembly of about 8000 members.
The kicker is that every bill that is passed by the Working Groups is required to be passed by the entire legislature in order to become law. That's a lot of voters.
How would this be accomplished? The initiative language calls for bills to be voted on by the entire membership electronically. Essentially, it brings internet voting into the process.
As I mentioned above, this attempt at an initiative to change the California Constitution was submitted to the Secretary of State and sent out for signatures without a lot of advance publicity. I very much doubt that many of you had any inkling that it was out there. Practically the only people who would have been aware were the shoppers approached by signature gatherers in supermarket parking lots and a few activist Republicans who heard Cox speak to them.
I strongly suspect that public airing of this initiative before it reached final form would have resulted in some of the rough edges getting sanded down. The requirement that the 12,000 members of the Cox legislature would have to vote on any bill is a deal breaker for most voters.
This is what we see in so many insider initiatives -- a hidden agenda down in the fine print. In practice, that requirement for thousands of people to vote on any piece of legislation would be a drag on getting things done. If nothing else, it adds another hurdle for legislation to get passed. It's strongly conservative in the sense that it makes it much harder to ever pass legislation.
One more thing about the Cox initiative: It does allow for certain types of legislation -- "urgency bills" -- to be passed by the Working Groups without the consent of the full legislature. This might result in the Working Groups overreaching by placing most upcoming legislation in the urgent category. The opponents of such urgency bills would likely look for opportunities to overturn such legislation by litigating the urgency. Our future laws would be caught up in endless court battles. Perhaps that was something that Cox and his advisors approve of, or maybe it was just legal sloppiness.
The Cox initiative -- when looked at carefully -- comes across as an interesting attempt to find a way to reform the problem of money in government. It has distinct flaws -- flaws which would have been identified and possibly remedied had this initiative come out of a public process with widespread public involvement.
By the way, the Cox public relations material about his run for governor reveals a garden variety right wing campaigner who is criticizing liberalism and, if I might add, California itself.
The other part of the equation that I haven't mentioned is that John Cox is an extremely unlikely candidate for governor. What's so strange about the Cox candidacy is that he lived and politicked in Illinois until well into the twenty-first century. He ran for office in Illinois and even included a failed attempt at the Republican presidential nomination. He is easily attackable as a candidate.
The Fate of the Cox Initiative: An interesting concept that was dropped on the public without warning
John Cox donated over two million dollars of his own money to put this initiative on the ballot. Because it would amend the state constitution, it required 585,407 signatures. The signature campaign failed by 25,501, so the California Neighborhood Legislative Districts and Working Groups Initiative of 2018 will not be on our November ballots.
It was an interesting attempt to reform the system, but it failed for a couple of reasons. Had it made it onto the ballot, it would be perceived as one more special interest initiative in a state where such measures are increasingly being rejected by the voters. It would also be tied to the John Cox for governor campaign, and the candidate is (so far) running on the usual Republican argument that the state is going to Hell and only he can fix it. It's a weak campaign approach.
Finally, the initiative shows the same kind of flaws that so many other initiatives contain. It includes the author's wish list for all sorts of changes, and some of these changes are going to be opposed by a significant number of voters. In short, the initiative is not completely thought through. For example, had the initiative confined itself to electing the Working Groups by local representatives, it would still be seen as a radical approach, but it would, at least, be a clear change with predictable results.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
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