Here is a roughly sketched beginning for a constitutional reform. It is a sequel to the post California: Time for a bugfix?
Goals:
- Increase representation: By adding representatives and shrinking district sizes, we can bring California’s government closer to the people.
- Increase viewpoint diversity: By pooling statewide votes to support multiple candidates/lists, we can ensure that more than the single most popular viewpoint is represented.
- Decrease roadblocks: By eliminating the requirement for every bill to pass both chambers, each chamber can build their own coalitions and get legislation passed. By giving each chamber their own focus, each chamber can industriously work on their own tasks, coming together as necessary for specific purposes.
Below the fold is my first stab at a solution.
We’ll revise article 4, so that instead of electing a fixed group of 40 senators and 80 assemblymen, we elect about 400 “financial assemblymen” and a fixed 100 “legislative assemblymen”. (Better names still required. I like assemblymen, simply because they don’t match titles with federal government representatives, but I don’t just want to hit a thesaurus for the positions.)
Financial assemblymen: The “about 400” is so that the number can be adjusted; I picked 400 so that we’re close to 1:100,000 initially. Each financial assemblymen must still represent more citizens than representatives to the US House of Representatives at the nation’s founding, but far fewer than today. (Each financial assemblymen still has to represent many more people than, say, New Hampshire’s 400 general court members, but it brings our representatives much closer to the average citizen than they are now.) I’m giving this group the power of the purse– they are responsible for all spending, including putting bond measures on the ballot.
The number of legislative assemblymen is set at 100– I’d initially thought about 50 (since that’s closer to the size of our current state senate), but 100 makes easy math for now. They are elected state wide from a party slate and do not have primary elections. Instead, each party registers a list of up to 100 members. When ballots are cast for their party, the party can appoint one representative to the legislative assembly for each percent of the vote that they receive. If, somehow, one party got all the votes cast, their 100 member slate would be the 100 legislative assemblymen. If the party got one percent of the vote, they would get to name one representative from their slate as their legislative assemblyman for the next term. This house has the power to pass laws, create districts, criminalize conduct, etc.
(Side notes: I’m thinking each party has to have a president whose role is to submit the initial 100 member slate and the final “these people will be serving for the next four years as representatives of our party” slate. I also have an idea for vote trading among the fractional percentages, but that’s too large a digression for now.)
Why I think it would work:
I think that we meet our goal of increasing representation by increasing the number of representatives. This increases the chance that you’ll know your assemblyman personally, or know someone who does.
Allocating representation to slates based on statewide voting percentages increases the chances of minority party and splinter/sectional major party members being a part of the government. The parties that get one or two percent of the vote could have their views represented in Sacramento, though they would have to form coalitions with other members to get anything passed.
While I didn’t go into detail, giving one house sole control of the budget and the other sole control of legislation allows them to each get core functions accomplished without the concurrence of the other house. They’ll still need to come together for many things– any new agency, for example, will need by laws to establish it and funds to pay its employees.
A reason I’m trying not to map them strictly to the current houses, is so that they can adopt rules and parliamentary procedures that make sense today, instead of trying to conform to 1870s era rules and procedures. I’m sure they’ll come up with ways to divide the work– they’ll probably establish committees and house leaders and the like. I don’t want to straight jacket them. Hopefully they’ll pick organizations and rules that make sense for the new system instead of retaining forms that make sense for the current houses out of tradition. (On the other hand, after working for 130+ years, it probably has a lot of important lessons that should be carried over.)