California’s legislative leaders have decided to trim the number of bills that members of the Assembly and state Senate can introduce.
Under the new rules, the 80 members of the Assembly will be able to introduce 35 bills each, down from 50. That brings it down since former Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon decided it was a good idea to raise the bill limit in 2017 from 30 to 50.
The 40 members of the Senate will likewise have a trim in the number of bills they can bring forward, from 40 to 35.
It’s something. This past session state lawmakers proposed a whopping 4,821 bills. Who knew California needed so many new pieces of legislation?
Even more impressively, of those several thousand bills, 2,252 actually made it through the Legislature, according to CalMatters. We’re sure the members of the Legislature really grappled with all of those bills and made sure they were very badly needed.
Sure.
To that point, Sen. Tom Umberg of Santa Ana told CalMatters of one hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee in which there were 64 bills presented. “It often doesn’t do justice to making sure that we create an effective policy,” he said.
Yeah we bet.
Former Assembly Speaker Bob Hertzberg was more blunt to CalMatters. “There’s too many laws. But the political industrial complex builds up — everybody’s got to justify their existence and have more and more bills. I think it undermines confidence from the public.”
That’s really hitting the nail on the head.
California is obviously a big state with diverse regions, localized challenges and so on. But there’s no way state lawmakers can truly drill down on solving major problems if they’re busy introducing as many laws as they can.
If the mere volume of bill introductions correlated at all with positive outcomes, there wouldn’t be so many lingering problems in California.
We get it, politicians want to look busy. They want to say they introduced a bill on something that will make them sound like a “leader” on said issue. They want to put out press releases to look impotant. But that’s not how you effectively legislate or solve problems.