Someone in Sacramento Is Actually Trying to Solve Problems

Every so often, the California Legislature does something that runs so contrary to its own reputation that it deserves a second look. This is one of those times.

Somewhere in the Capitol, while the rest of Sacramento spent the year sorting itself into the usual camps, a group of 26 lawmakers from both parties and both houses has been quietly meeting every other week to do the least fashionable thing in American politics: look at a problem, ask what would actually fix it, and try to pass that.

They call themselves the Problem Solvers Caucus, and I confess the name made me skeptical at first. Sacramento is full of groups with hopeful names and thin records. But this one is different in a way that turns out to matter enormously, and the difference comes down to a single rule.

Members of the Problem Solvers Caucus agree, in writing, not to actively work against one another's bills.

That sounds modest until you understand what it replaces. The ordinary machinery of a legislature runs on the opposite assumption, that the other party's win is your loss, and that a good idea carried by the wrong author is a threat to be smothered rather than a proposal to be improved. Strip that reflex out, even partially, and something unusual becomes possible. A Republican and a Democrat can put their names on the same bill without either one lying awake wondering when the ambush is coming.

It is the only caucus I know of among the Legislature's 16 non-party groups that operates under such a rule. Of the 2,278 bills introduced last session, only 11 had a Democrat and a Republican signed on together as lead authors. That is less than one-half of one percent. In an institution where cross-party authorship has become almost extinct, this caucus is one of the few places it might still happen.

The group's stated concerns are the ones California voters actually name when pollsters ask: the cost of housing, energy, health care, transportation. Its four co-chairs, two Democrats and two Republicans, evenly split between the Assembly and the Senate, meet roughly every two weeks to set an agenda, then bring in practitioners and experts to work through it.

The caucus wrote its philosophy into a statement of purpose, and the line that stayed with me was this: that economic prosperity and affordability are not competing priorities but inseparable ones, and that policy should be measured by results, not intentions alone.

I have read enough mission statements to be immune to most of them. This one describes a way of governing I wish were far more common than it is.

And it produces results. The caucus pushed through the bill that finally made California the last state in the country to legalize E15 gasoline, a change projected to save drivers around 20 cents a gallon. It co-authored the measure that freed a stalled $10 billion climate and water bond from a regulatory delay that could have held the money up for more than a year. Both passed without a single no vote in either chamber. Fair enough, those were not the bills anyone was spoiling to fight over, and the caucus's harder tests are still ahead. But in a building that struggles to pass a lunch order across the aisle, unanimous is not nothing.

What finally won me over, though, was not the caucus in the abstract. It was two of the co-chairs who run it. Neither Anamarie Ávila Farías, a Democrat from Martinez, or Suzette Valladares, a Republican from Santa Clarita, has traded her convictions for the comfort of the mushy middle. They are not "centrists" who split every difference. They are partisans who have decided that being a partisan does not require treating the other side as the enemy.

That distinction is why the Problem Solvers Caucus is worth watching. It is not asking anyone to abandon a principle. It is asking its members to hold fast to their principles and still start from a different question: not whether this is a Republican or Democratic idea, but whether it is a good idea and the best one on the table.

This kind of effort could certainly be swept away by a tough primary or a bad news cycle. But for now, in a Legislature that too often mistakes conflict for progress, there is a caucus that measures itself by what it actually gets done, and two women at the center of it who keep showing, not just saying, that the work is real.

It may not last. Plenty of good things in politics don't. But it is happening, and after the decade we have all just lived through, that strikes me as reason enough to pay attention.