Abolish the Senate (no the other one)
California’s state government strongly resembles the structure of the United States Federal Government. It has three coequal branches: executive, legislature, and judiciary; it has an active bureaucracy; and its legislature is bicameral consisting of a lower house (The Assembly) and and upper house (The Senate). However, unlike the United States Senate, which was famously constructed at the Republic’s founding as part of a great compromise, no such historical explanation exists for California and its bicameral system serves little to no modern day purpose.
In this post and those that follow, I’ll lay out why we gain some benefits from a bicameral legislatures at the Federal level and why those benefits do not hold at the state level. I’ll also argue that having two houses is quite costly and where those resources could better be channeled. Finally I’ll address reasonable counterarguments to my position as a matter of good faith.
Ultimately my point here is that I just can’t think of many good reasons today why our state government has a bicameral legislature, and I can think of at least 27 million reasons why we might be better off without one.
A Brief Aside on Ethos
I am not a small government libertarian by any means, nor am I resentful of hard working public servants who trade talent to the public good in return for below market wages and perhaps a more favorable retirement plan. I‘m the kind of curious leftist who reads a lot of Vox, so in general I’m curious about policy, want to solve problems in the neoliberal tradition (Matt Yglesias), but am open to expanding the Overton Window and thinking about better ways forward (Ezra Klein).
Where Bicameral Legislatures came from in the U.S.
At the U.S. Constitutional Convention in 1787 the delegates met to draft the Articles of Confederation, the relatively weakly structured Federal Government that would be heavily amended in 1789. In deciding the structure of the legislature, the most powerful and influential branch, the delegates could not agree on how states ought to be represented. Delegates from Virginia, representing the interest of the larger southern states, put forward a plan whereby states would receive a number of representatives proportional to their populations.
However, smaller states, many of them northern, feared trading away their autonomy to a Federation whose interests would be dominated by those larger states. Conceiving of themselves as sovereign entities with characteristics and idiosyncrasies unique to their states, this delegation put forward the New Jersey Plan in which all states would appoint an equal number of representatives. Ultimately the Convention struck a compromise between the two plans: a House of Representatives with representation determined by population, and a Senate with each state represented by two U.S. Senators regardless of the state’s population. Born of necessity and with partially distinct powers and duties, this compromise, though anti majoritarian was at the time necessary and does yield some theoretical advantages.
Advantages of U.S. Government’s Bicameral Legislature
Aside from being necessary to the creation of the Republic the distinct structures of the House and Senate do continue to afford us certain advantages today. Though certain powers given to these bodies at their inception are no longer all that consequential (the House’s exclusive revenue raising powers versus the Senate’s ability to advise and consent on treaties for example), the different constituents that elect the two chambers and the different frequency with which the houses turn over continue to provide advantages to governing.
Different Constituencies Represented
Though not the case at their inception, today members of the House and Senate are both directly elected by the voters of their states. Senators are elected on a statewide basis, while House members are elected to represent certain districts, which are drawn and redrawn after each decennial census according to the laws of that state. This difference in electors means members of the different houses represent similar but distinct interests. Senators, elected by all voters within their state, should represent the essential character and interests of the median voter within their entire constituency. Members of the House, elected by smaller communities of interest, can (theoretically) be influenced by and advocate more granularly for the interests of these communities.
To put a finer point on it, one could imagine a U.S. Senator from California advocating for a moderate to liberal agenda as that accords with the overall partisan lean of her state’s voters, while a Representative from Sacramento California might specifically advocate for bills that increase flood insurance protections as her district is closely situated next to a delta and major flood plane.
Different Tenures in Office
Senators are elected to six year terms and every two years, roughly one third of U.S. Senators are up for reelection. On the other hand all members of the House of Representatives are up for reelection every two years. These different term lengths are meant to make the House the more accountable chamber, more in tune with the up to the minute passions and feelings of their constituents, while the Senate is meant to be the more deliberative body, insulated as they are by their longer terms. One could realistically imagine a Senator taking an unpopular vote shortly after winning their seat. Thinking about the current pace of the news cycle, what do you imagine the odds are that their constituents remember that vote six years later and hold them to account for it? Exactly. House members on the other hand have to answer for everything because as soon as they win election, they have to be thinking about reelection (and associated fundraising for it).
At the Federal level, two houses adds both financial and procedural costs of doing business for the country, but there is at least a historical rationale that explains why we have this system, and the houses are distinct enough from one another that one could justifiably argue the benefits outweigh the costs.
Not so at the state level.
Having two Houses is Costly for California
Between December 2018 and February 2019 the California State Senate spent a little under $27 million as its operating budget. I will readily concede, that’s small potatoes compared to the $202 billion budget the state plans to operate in total this year, but it’s not nothing especially given the fiscal crunch the state and its municipalities are about to face as a result of COVID-19. Even before COVID, the state had long been dealing with debt from unfunded liabilities due to pension agreements and healthcare payments to retired state workers. The state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office estimated the total unfunded debt in 2018 was around $160 billion. $27 million is a handful of dirt compared to that financial hole, but it could end up mattering if the state eventually has to choose between paying down the debt or making cuts to things like public higher education or discretionary social services.
Furthermore, that $27 million is only a breakdown of the state Senate’s actual operating budget. It does not account for the added size of agency staff and the Legislative Analyst’s Office needed to respond to the needs of 40 additional legislators and their staffs. I will refrain from speculating what the added statewide staffing costs are that result from the Senate, but note the $27 million I’ll run with is a conservative estimate.
Perhaps even more alarming is that California local governments, its cities and counties are also facing similar liability concerns, also on the order of billions of dollars. These problems are anticipated to get worse, as counties can expect significantly reduced sales, property, and hotel tax revenues as a result of the global pandemic. Local governments provide services many consider essential by operating fire departments, police departments, public transportation authorities, and libraries. The state’s recently enacted budget provides over $2 billion in relief to local governments, so here’s a place where the $27 million in savings might actually make a dent as further assistance.
Bicameral Benefits don’t hold up at the State Level
Unlike the Federal Constitution’s Great Compromise, California faced no such constraints at its founding. When California held its first Constitutional Convention in 1849, the state borrowed heavily from Iowa’s state constitution in deciding how to structure the government. Iowa in turn borrowed heavily from Wisconsin’s state constitution that it used to gain entrance to the Union in accordance with the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. From there the trail goes cold and it’s unclear to me why Wisconsin modeled its state government and bicameral off of the Federal structure. The point is though, that California did not adopt a bicameral legislature out of necessity instead it appears as though California’s delegates were just following the crowd.
Without that necessity to explain the origin, we can move downstream and ask whether the benefits of the Federal bicameral system accrue to California. They don’t.
Different Constituencies Represented
Take a gander at the two maps above, State Senate districts by partisan control on the left, state Assembly districts by partisan control on the right. Hard to tell the difference right? This is a very crude way of beginning to make the case that the two houses are largely duplicative of one another in the constituencies they represent, and in future installments I’ll make a stronger case with a data-driven argument, but for introductory purposes this is a good place to start.
Unlike the U.S. House and Senate, the California Assembly elects 80 representatives with district sizes apportioned by population (so denser urban parts of the state get more representatives in smaller districts and rural areas get fewer) while the California Senate elects 40 representatives with district sizes apportioned by…population. So the way districts are apportioned across the two houses is identical the only difference is Senate districts should be twice as large as Assembly districts. Theoretically this could create differences at the margins in how larger or smaller districts vote in the aggregate, but with host of research on how population density is highly correlative with partisan affiliation (rural = red, urban = blue), this just isn’t the case. Ultimately these two maps are enough to start the discussion that Assembly and Senate districts that overlap geographically also overlap politically and therefore are largely redundant of one another.
Different Tenures in Office
Here I have to start by making a concession. The State Assembly and State Senate are elected on different timescales. Assemblymembers, like members of the U.S. House of Representatives, are elected every two years while California State Senators serve four year terms. Four does not equal two and you can’t argue with facts. Still the practical implication of the U.S. Senate’s six year terms was to allow the body to be more deliberative and allow Senators to take less popular votes since they were insulated by their longer terms.
Here I cannot make an intuitive argument, examining this point of do the Assembly and Senate tend to vote differently from one another or are they once again duplications of each other can only be answered by looking at the data. For the time being I will state that my hypothesis is that they do not vote differently than one another and here’s why.
Political parties serve to backfill information to voters when they don’t know much about their representative. The more well known an elected official is the less they rely on their party to send a signal to voters. That’s why you end up with Democratic Senators like Joe Manchin in West Virginia, the state where Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton by more than 40 points in 2016. Party matters less as a signal to U.S. Senators because most Americans have at least passing familiarity with who their Senators are (I’ll bet you can name the U.S. Senators who represent California). I hypothesize this is not the case with California State Senators (can you name yours). Furthermore, because most voters are not familiar with who represents them, that means State Senators must rely more on the party to send signals when it comes time for reelection. Meaning State Senators are no more likely to break with party norms and take unpopular votes than the Assembly.
Wrapping up
My goal here was just to set up the argument and give you my theory, priors, and hypotheses. I don’t expect you to take a mostly theoretical argument as persuasive though hopefully you enjoyed this introduction. In the posts that follow I plan to do three things:
- Use past electoral voting behavior to demonstrate that Assembly and Senate districts largely duplicate the same constituencies.
- Use Assembly and Senate voting records to demonstrate the two chambers largely vote with their parties and don’t use the different frequencies of their elections to their advantages.
- Talk through counterarguments to this position. Chief among them, the argument that eliminating a chamber would concentrate and exacerbate problems within the remaining house such as corruption, bribery, and to a lesser extent special interest influence.
Ultimately my point here is that I just can’t think of many good reasons today why our state government has a bicameral legislature, and I can think of at least 27 million reasons why we might be better off without one.
