State Senator Jeff Denham is warming up for his 2010 Lt. Gov. bid by suggesting the solution to the state’s crisis of democracy is to break government even further by making the legislature part-time:

State Sen. Jeff Denham, R-Merced, introduced a constitutional amendment Friday aimed at shortening the legislative session by several months. The amendment would also separate the budget and policy-making processes into odd years and even years, respectively….

Denham proposes that legislators work half the time for half the pay. Each legislator’s office budget would be cut in half, according to his proposal.

To call this a bad idea is to insult all the other bad ideas that have been floated over the years. California’s vast population, complex economy, crippled finances and numerous other ongoing challenges require a full-time legislature with a professional support staff. A part-time legislature will not be able to handle the load. Problems will go unattended, and government’s ability to meet the people’s needs will be limited.

Which is entirely the point. What better way to scale back government and prevent it from doing anything at all than to turn its legislature, the key policy-making body, into a part-time collection of wealthy dilettantes? For right-wingers who are convinced that government is inherently evil (except when it helps enrich themselves) it’s a logical step.

As states like Texas have found, it is also a recipe for disaster. Texas’s part-time legislature is a study in dysfunction. Because the legislature does not have the resources of a full-time body, ongoing issues remain unaddressed. Wind insurance problems stemming from Hurricane Rita, which hit in 2005, still have not been addressed by the part-time legislature. Policy problems that crop up when the legislature is not in session either go ignored, or the governor has to call so many special sessions that the legislature is a de facto full-time legislature without the staff and financial support it needs.

In 1965 Speaker Jesse Unruh pushed through a ballot measure creating a full-time legislature for California. At the time our state government was the pride of California, seen as one of the nation’s best governments. Unruh understood that a state as big and complex as ours needed a professional legislature that could make informed decisions. He also recognized that unless the legislature was full-time, with the pay to match, that average Californians would never be able to enter the legislature. Only the wealthy would be able to take months at a time off from their jobs to do the people’s business.

A part-time legislature would only be open to people like that. People like Jeff Denham:

After graduating from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, Denham chose the agriculture industry for a career and now owns and operates Denham Plastics, the leading supplier of reusable containers in the agriculture industry. He and his family also farm almonds at their ranch in Merced County. Denham has amassed a large fortune from the success of his business ventures.

I’m sure that a legislature full of wealthy ranchers like Jeff Denham would be a realistic reflection of the actual diversity of the state of California.

Perhaps I’m being too generous to Denham in taking his idea seriously, since it is little more than a temper tantrum:

If this Legislature is going to use a puppet sentencing commission to release prisoners then its usefulness as a ‘full-time’ institution no longer exists,” he said in a statement. “One of the Legislature’s top priorities should be to enact laws that protect the public, not authorize back-door delegation of early releases of criminals.” (from the Salinas Californian article linked above)

I suppose next on Denham’s list is a part-time judiciary, since it was the courts that have forced the Legislature to address the prisons crisis?

Of course, if Denham were serious about streamlining government, he would be campaigning to abolish the mostly useless Lt. Gov. office. Instead he is going to spend millions to get himself elected to that same office. I’m glad to see Denham puts his principles before his career.