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If Senate District 29 looks like a huge reclining child’s head, screaming with a mouth the shape of most of Buena Park, well that’s what it feels like sometimes too!
Another election year is here and the amateur and professional politicos in Orange County can’t seem to contain their prognosticating or pontificating. From doom and gloom predictions on a national scale should Trump or Clinton or Sanders be elected, to more nuanced debates about local races, this election cycle is in full swing. Here at the Orange Juice Blog, our benevolent overlords [Ed. note: not that benevolent] have put out their own primary election voter guides for your consumption and likely castigation. I have my own ideas on whom to elect and who might do the best job of representing me and my community, as I’m sure anyone plugged in to our local and national news media may have themselves.
But this post isn’t about elections. Well, it is — but, it isn’t. Let me explain.
I live in Brea and work in Los Alamitos. It’s a bit of a drive, but not as bad as some of my friends’ commutes. I am a fairly knowledgeable voter in my community. I know who my mayor is. I personally know the president of the chamber of commerce. I keep up on city council meetings. I know who my state assemblyman and senator are. I see their names (well, at least one of them anyway) plastered on colorful signs dotting every street corner from Brea Boulevard and Central Avenue to Katella Avenue and Los Alamitos Boulevard. That last bit got me thinking.
Just how big are our state assembly and senate districts? How can one person have signs for their candidacy for state senator in two cities separated by almost 20 miles? There are literally hundreds of thousands of people between those two cities. I drive through Brea, Fullerton, Anaheim, Cypress, and Los Alamitos on my commute. How can the same person represent all of those constituents (and more) in our state senate?
They can’t. Not realistically, anyway. But they have to because our state constitution dictates they must. Article 4, section 2 of our constitution states that the senate will have a membership of 40 senators while the assembly will have a membership of 80 individuals. Period. Currently, there are no stipulations for population density of senate or assembly districts. There are only hard caps on the numbers of senators and assemblymen in our state legislature. This has led to some rather ridiculous sizes of state legislative districts.
First in the Nation
As Californians, we love being first. We are the trailblazers. The entrepreneurs. The best of the best in anything we do. It’s part of our culture — our identity. We lead the nation in so many things — economic development, environmental protections, progressive gender legislation, among others causes. We also have the distinct honor of leading the nation in one very troubling category (at least to me) — the population represented by state legislators.
According to Ballotpedia, a California state assemblyman represents an average population just north of 465,000, while a California state senator represents an average district of a little over 931,000 people. To put that into perspective, Texas has a ratio of about 167,000 constituents per state assemblyman and 811,000 constituents per state senator. Granted, they have fewer state senators than we do (for whatever reason), but I believe their assembly representatives have a far better grasp on the sentiment of their districts than our assemblymen could ever hope to have. Our assembly districts have nearly 3 times the population as Texas’s.
The average across the country is about 60,000 citizens per assembly district and around 150,000 per senate district. That seems much more reasonable than the situation in which we currently find ourselves. Would that we could find a political golden mean in terms of representation. We might actually have a legislature of which we can be proud in this state. The way everything is organized now just makes legislating unmanageable.
Consider my ever present, ever reelected Congressman Ed Royce. He represents the 39th Congressional District in California. The estimated size of his constituency is in the neighborhood of 640,000 people. That means that my state senator represents a larger number of voters than does my Congressional representative. How does that make sense? The short answer is it doesn’t, and as our population continues to grow the disparity will only become more ridiculous.
What can we do?
A few years ago a businessman and lawyer names John Cox proposed a ballot initiative to change the way the California legislature is organized. His proposal never made it to the ballot, but that doesn’t mean his idea was all that bad. In a nutshell, his idea was to increase the number of state senate and assembly districts close to 100-fold, making assemblymen responsible for around 5,000 voters while senators would represent about 10,000. These “neighborhood legislators” would then elect an internal working body of 80 assemblymen and 40 senators to conduct the business of the state legislature. Voting on bills would be done by the entirety of the legislature, not just the working body.
Some provisions in his ballot initiative allowed for emergency legislation by the working body without the approval of the entire legislature, among other things. You can read the full text of his proposal here, if you so desire. There are some good ideas and, in my opinion, some unnecessary things, but overall I think it was a step in the right direction.
While Cox’s idea failed to garner the signatures needed to get it on the ballot, we shouldn’t give up on the idea entirely. California assembly and senate districts are far too large for any state legislator to be in any way effective in representing the needs of the people in his or her district. My senate district spans three counties. How can Ling Ling Chang, Josh Newman, or Sukhee Kang hope to represent me in Brea while simultaneously representing people in Chino Hills, Diamond Bar, Buena Park, and Anaheim with their significantly larger populations? My guess is that they can’t — at least not in any realistic way —
and that worries me. With smaller districts I feel we’d be able to actually have our voices heard in Sacramento and not just be an afterthought.
Voter disenfranchisement happens every day California. It’s time we did something about it.
Nice job, Sean.
John Cox proposed a ballot initiative to change the way the California legislature is organized. His proposal never made it to the ballot, but that doesn’t mean his idea was all that bad. In a nutshell, his idea was to increase the number of state senate and assembly districts close to 100-fold, making assemblymen responsible for around 5,000 voters while senators would represent about 10,000. These “neighborhood legislators” would then elect an internal working body of 80 assemblymen and 40 senators to conduct the business of the state legislature. Voting on bills would be done by the entirety of the legislature, not just the working body.”
Did they lock this John Cox in the nut house?
Not that I know of, but, as I said, the sentiment of his proposal wasn’t all bad. Our district sizes are untenable. While I don’t think state legislator numbers should be increased 100-fold, there should be some stipulation in the state constitution that assembly and senate district sizes should be tied to population. I don’t see how that’s an unreasonable position.
WHAT is the operating cost of the current State Legislature ? Now apply your “100-fold increase” (or MORE – NOTHING in society or politics is linear !) to that. Pension promises, inefficiency, dysfunction, and waste in the CURRENT system already have CA residents viewing the world (those that bother to) from beneath an enormous deficit. WHAT will fund that “100 fold increase”, or do we just throw it atop the pile and keep looking the other way?