"It's A Slap of Reality"

On the day that more than 600 legislative staffers lost their jobs, Speaker Willie Brown ascended the rostrum of the ornate, walnut-and-velvet California state assembly chamber and, with a trembling of his smartly tailored shoulders, broke down and wept. Veteran assemblymen who have known him for 25 years as a tough-minded political chieftain were amazed. "It's a tragedy that we have to let these people go," Brown sobbed. "This place will not be the same."

California's voters set the cuts in motion last November by narrowly passing Proposition 140, a ballot initiative that hit legislators with a double whammy: it not only decreed maximum terms of six years for assemblymen and eight for senators, but more immediately ordered a cut of nearly 40% in the $190 million legislative operating budget. Last week, as a wave of mass layoffs was announced, the senate shed 200 of its nearly 1,000 employees, and the assembly dropped 440 of its staff of 1,500. Gone, along with clerks and secretaries, were some 300 policy experts; 15 subcommittees were disbanded.

Speaker Brown, who had led a $5 million campaign against the ballot initiative, was forced to apply the lion's share of the cutbacks. "It's a crippling blow," moaned Brown. Without the experts, for example, legislators were not responding promptly to the budget recently proposed by the new Governor, Republican Pete Wilson. "We don't have the analytical ability," said Brown. "We don't have the talent back there able to do the job."

Brown's Democrats, who control both houses, predict other dire consequences: a brain drain that is bound to deter the best and brightest from working in the statehouse, and a weakening of the legislature as it confronts some of its own ex-staffers now in the ranks of special-interest lobbies. One surviving expert, respected Democratic economist Steven Thompson, 49, predicts that when the term limits start taking effect in 1996, the legislative branch could even suffer constitutionally. Reason: the inexperience of rotating members will prevent it from holding up its end of the checks-and-balances system. So vehement was the protest among the majority of political regulars that last month the rules committees of both houses voted to challenge Proposition 140 with a lawsuit.

But not everybody was unhappy with the cuts. Their most gratified supporter was the author of Proposition 140, Pete Schabarum, 62, a crusty member of the Los Angeles county board of supervisors and former state assemblyman who is now campaigning to extend the term-limit stricture to the state's Senators and 45 Congressmen and to elected bodies in all 58 counties.

A tiny minority -- six Republicans out of a total of 120 legislators -- also supports Proposition 140. Conservative Tom McClintock, 34, sees the budget cuts as a chance to unload "political hacks who have been parked on the legislators' payrolls." Says Robert Forsythe, 50, a surviving senate aide: "Let's face it -- the cuts have come as a special shock because this place has felt itself to be encased in glass and somehow protected from the layoffs and cutbacks so many people have been feeling around the country. It's a slap of reality."