[zeruch]

Terms limits are a red herring. They punish good and bad candidates, and don't actually help the problems with the elected class: campaign funding and competitive districts/gerrymandering.

Wanna know what its a "single party state"? Because one of the major parties, up until Pete Wilson, acted like a real party, then became a caricature (the GOP had 40+ percent of the state and registrants for ages, which is how guys like Nixon, Reagan, Deukmajian, Schwartzenegger etc all got elected) but now comprise less than 25% of the state registered voters (although many are now independents with a center-right lean) and the GOP leadership in the state are utterly oblivious clowns who live in rural bubbles like the Northern areas that want to start a neo-fascist Confederate Idiocracy with Eastern Oregon and Southern Idaho, or urban derp-bubbles like West Orange County and Torrey Pines, who just want brown people to tend to their golf courses and think Ayn Rand is one hot bitch. The Democrats in California, a party with near zero internal coherence, and no real stability at all, win because the Koch-knobs and Trumpkins that "lead" the opposition are as inane and insane as they are.

[specialist]

> Terms limits are a red herring.

Yes and: Disempowering legislators empowers administrators and lobbyists. Power is zero sum.

I supported term limits until I saw first hand how agency heads run circles around legislators.

Now, I advocate making legislators more powerful, more independent, and therefore less dependent on lobbyists, contributors, and agencies.

Make legislating a real, full time job. More resources for staff, to help mitigate infoglut and provide real constituent services. Etc, etc.

> campaign funding and competitive districts/gerrymandering.

Absolutely. I advocate pretty much all the good government reforms. Public financing of campaigns, approval voting for executive positions, proportional representation for assemblies, restoring fairness doctrine, open government as default (eg something like data.gov for most everything). Etc, etc.

PS-

Lawrence Krubner's blog Demodexio is really good. Dives into nonobvious, nonsexy, common sense fundamental structural reforms for democracy, elections, and policy work.

So far, Krubner's advocacy matches my own experiences and observations. Here's just one great example:

Should the votes from voters combine on a per-issue basis, rather than a per-party or a per-candidate basis? [2022/05/13] Why did Kenneth Arrow think that Approval Voting would do a better job of bringing to the surface the real concerns of voters?

https://demodexio.substack.com/p/should-the-votes-from-voter...

[dragonwriter]

> the GOP had 40+ percent of the state and registrants for ages, which is how guys like Nixon, Reagan, Deukmajian, Schwartzenegger etc all got elected

The last is really not true; Schwarzenegger was elected well after the California Republican Party had durably stopped trying to appeal to California voters in a way that could win statewide elections or legislative majorities and instead committed itself to appealing to the most extreme of the national Republican donor class. That's why they (and particularly Darryl Issa, who hoped to used it as a vehicle for his own election) funded the recall drive, aiming for an opportunity where they wouldn't actually need to get more votes than retention to win.

But once the recall was set, Schwarzenegger, who had basically no connection to the institutional Republican Party, swept in and blew away the establishment Republicans (leading to Darryl Issa’s literally tearful exit from the race that he has spent $1.7 million out of his own pocket to make happen).

> The Democrats in California, a party with near zero internal coherence, and no real stability at all, win because

Largely of the lack of internal ideological coherence and stability, making them able to run at least one candidate that fits the moment and district in any given election.

[zeruch]

"Schwarzenegger was elected well after the California Republican Party had durably stopped trying to appeal to California voters"

No, but his tenure helped to foment their internal confusion about where to go. Arnold himself refused to play a party line game, and that in turn led to ever larger fissures between the national RNC and the State leadership.

[Aloha]

Compare the quality of legislation passed before term limits to after (the last real structural reforms to state government were before term limits), I remember the difference. The current system encourages "make a name for yourself than move on to bigger and better things" and prevents the legislature acting as a base of political power - that gets in the way of long term thinking.

To the rest of your comment - I think big tent parties are good, but not ones that require ideological fealty the way current parties do, you can't build a durable majority with left social issues, a weird mashup or left wing and right wing economics and "progressive" requirement that everyone hew to proper "optics".

That's a recipe for never fixing any of the actual problems, with the added benefit of giving your base and activists plenty of ideological wars that can never be won.

[dragonwriter]

> Compare the quality of legislation passed before term limits to after

After is generally better, at least than in an equal time period before, though I don't attribute it to term limits, which were a bad idea.

> the last real structural reforms to state government were before term limits

The last major structural reform to state government was when it was finally made modestly governable by the repeal of the supermajority budget requirement in 2010, 14 years after term limits applied to the Assembly (a little over two full turnovers forced by term limits), 12 years after they applied to the Senate (one full turnover and halfway through the next.)

The last major structural reforms of government administration (which may be more what you are thinking of, though of less practical effect) were a series under Schwarzenegger in 2005 (or so, not sure they all happened that year), still well after term limits.

[Aloha]

What did Schwarzenegger reform?

[zeruch]

He himself did not reform too much, but not for lack of tying. In the end one could easily argue that he helped mainline numerous ideas that had been previously flat out obstructed by the GOP: redistricting guidelines/gerrymandering (wanting to tae the districting process out of party hands altogether), environmental efforts (Global Warming Solutions Act), proposed marijuana legalization, opposed Bush IIs border fence initiatives..in a way he's very California: very immigrant, very Hollywood, very macho but a little hippy, weirdly contrarian and unapologetic about it.

He was not the most effective governor, but he also was not a destructive or fundamentally divisive one (yes he had soe hot points but I can't think of a single governor of this state who hasn't) and he certainly performed better than I thought he would.

[Aloha]

Yeah, that was more or less my point. He was a decent governor, but he didn't fix (or really attempt to fix) the structural issues in Sacramento, I do think reasonably highly about him. Though I voted to retain Davis, Davis lost his office because of how bad he is at retail politics.