A Speaker with Clout
Dan Walters of the Sacramento Bee opines about how it looks from the top these days in the California legislature:
Jesse Unruh and his one-time protégé, Willie Brown, are widely regarded as the most influential speakers of the state Assembly.
Unruh made the speakership a center of political power second only to the governorship in the 1960s. Brown’s 14-year speakership in the 1980s and 1990s surpassed Unruh’s in longevity and power consolidation. Famously, Brown once termed himself the “ayatollah of the Legislature.”
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Post-Brown speakers could hold the position for only short periods, two years or less. Within the Capitol, power shifted from the Assembly to the Senate and its more seasoned leaders, notably Brown’s longtime friend and political partner, John Burton.
The imperial speakership will never reappear as long as term limits are in place, but the current occupant of the office, Fabian Núñez, is demonstrating that even with that constraint, the speakership can regain much of its authority — even meting out Brown-like discipline of Democrats who exhibit too much independence.
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Confounding pundits, Núñez and Schwarzenegger forged a close personal relationship; Núñez routinely refers to Schwarzenegger as a friend, heaps public praise on the governor and helped him recover public standing with an infrastructure improvement program and, this week, with an amicable budget compromise. That’s led to the widespread belief that Núñez wants Schwarzenegger to win re-election this year so that the governorship will be available in 2010 for the speaker’s buddy, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, while Núñez segues into the mayoralty.
