Breaking Up California

Breaking Up California

Another article that I couldn't interest PajamasMedia in running. (Admittedly, I write them faster than they have space to publish them.) It's unfortunate that there aren't more conservative magazines that:

1. Pay for articles.

2. You don't have to be someone important to get published in.
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The May 14, 2009 Economist talks about how California has become ungovernable—which is apparent to almost anyone who pays any attention to the Golden State’s annual budget crises—and gives a pretty obvious set of explanations for why. Only a minority of Californians actually vote, and they are “older, whiter, and richer” than the population as a whole. (And who’s to blame for that? The last I checked, there weren’t any Klansmen blocking the polling places.)

The Economist also blames gerrymandering and “self-sorting” into highly partisan electoral districts for the problem—with no apparent awareness that redrawing those district lines along latitude would largely wipe out this partisanship. (Generally, the closer you are to the ocean, the more expensive the property, and thus, the more dominant the Democrats.)

It is certainly true that the California Constitution’s twin requirements of a 2/3 vote of both houses to pass a budget and to raise taxes are part of the problem. The popular referendum process’s interaction with the legislature contribute significantly to the problems. But The Economist, and presumably the experts that they interviewed, seemed to have missed California government’s biggest problem: bigness.

I grew up in California. I spent most of my adult life there, and I was as actively involved in politics there as a non-millionaire could realistically be. But in the entire time that I was so involved, I never met a member of the California legislature. At most, I saw a few members from a distance. I certainly never ever shook hands with any of them, much less had a conversation about public policy.

Here in Idaho, my legislators know me by sight (and not just the one that I tried to knock out in the Republican primary last year)—and I have had serious public policy conversations with other members of the Idaho legislature. Last year, my state senator so irritated me with his sponsorship of a bill that I ran against him in the Republican primary. Okay, I got beaten by 24 points—but I was able to make a serious effort, spending less than $10,000. In California, this would not have been possible. What’s the difference?

California has 33 million people—so the 80 members of the lower house of the California legislature each represent 412,500 people. By comparison, each member of the Idaho lower house represents less than 22,000 people. You don’t have to be obscenely rich to spend fifty cents per voter on advertising running for Idaho legislature—nor do you have to sell your soul to raise the money required to run a serious campaign. (Well, I suppose if you really wanted to sell your soul, you could, but I was able to raise huge amounts of money without anyone asking to see if I still had the pink slip.) It is even possible to spend a few months going door to door, and actually talk to a majority of the voters.

Spend fifty cents per voter in a California legislative race—and you need enough money that you are either personally wealthy, or you will have to sell your soul to even have a realistic chance. (Former California state senator Alan Robbins wrote quite eloquently about this problem from his federal prison cell at Terminal Island.) Going door to door in a California legislative district is just not possible. Even if you spend five minutes per voter, eight hours a day, it would take more than six years to talk to a majority. California’s bigness has created a chasm between its legislators and voters that simply can’t be resolved without either a dramatically larger legislative body—or a much smaller state.

Chopping California into seven states of a bit less than five million people each would make each of those seven legislatures substantially more responsive to the voters. Depending on the new boundaries, it seems likely that each of the new states would be considerably more politically cohesive than the current legislative madhouse. The State of Bay Area could pass whatever silly gun control laws they want (until the Supreme Court incorporates the Second Amendment against the states); the States of Modoc, Mojave, Sierra, and Borrego would probably end up with gun control laws like their neighbors of Oregon, Nevada, and Arizona. Bay Area and Los Angeles would probably make their entire states into undocumented worker sanctuary zones; Modoc, Mojave, and Sierra would probably pass laws punishing renting to and employing illegal aliens. I suspect that the vast majority of Californians would find their new state governments more to their liking than the current gibbering collective idiot that presides in Sacramento.

Yes, the state of Bay Area would still be pretty hard left—but at least Bay Area’s U.S. Senators Boxer (from Marin County) and Feinstein (San Francisco) would be counterbalanced by Republican Senators from the states of Sierra, Mojave, and Borrego. And with six more states—why, we might be able to make Obama’s claim to have visited 57 states correct!