Must a state politician live within his or her district to appropriately represent the citizens who live and work there?
With the experience of former state Sen. Roderick D. “Rod” Wright still fresh in many voters’ minds, this is a question being raised after the introduction of a bill to relax the definition of what constitutes a “domicile” for the purpose of voting or running for a seat in the Legislature.
Article 4, Section 2, of the California Constitution requires that, in order to be eligible to run for the Assembly or state Senate, one must have “been a resident of the legislative district for one year, and a citizen of the United States and a resident of California for 3 years, immediately preceding the election.” But Article 2, Section 3, grants the Legislature the power of defining what constitutes a residence.
Under Senate Bill 163, introduced by state Sen. Steven Bradford, D-Gardena, who, incidentally, represents Rod Wright’s old district, a candidate for Assembly or state Senate would need only to own or lease property within a district to establish “legal tenancy.”
Though a number of politicians have been accused of living outside of their districts in recent years — including state Sen. Jim Nielsen, R-Gerber, and state Sen. Richard Pan, D-Sacramento, the Sacramento Bee notes — former state Sen. Rod Wright has become the poster boy for such behavior. Wright was suspended by the Senate and forced to resign in disgrace in 2014 after a judge upheld his conviction for lying about living within his district.
“A jury convicted Wright in early 2014 on eight felony counts — two counts of perjury, one count of filing a false declaration of candidacy and five counts of fraudulent voting in elections in 2008 and 2009,” the Sacramento Bee reported. As a result, he was sentenced to 90 days in jail (though he was released after a little over an hour due to jail overcrowding), three years probation and 1,500 hours of community service. In addition, he was banned from ever again holding public office.
Wright had owned an apartment complex in Inglewood, and his stepmother was renting a unit from him there, but it was determined that he was actually living in Baldwin Hills, about five miles outside the boundaries of his senate district.
SB163 would not necessarily be unprecedented. After all, members of Congress do not have to live within the district they represent; they only have to reside in the same state.
In order to be a legitimate and effective representative, and to help ensure that an officeholder’s interests do not run contrary to those he or she represents, one must have some close ties to the district he or she is charged with representing. It is possible, however, that owning property or a business within a district could qualify as offering a sufficient nexus of interests.
More importantly, so long as there is transparency regarding a candidate’s true residency, the voters of a particular district should, ultimately, be the ones to determine appropriate residency, not far-removed state politicians. We suspect that, in most cases, voters would not take too kindly to perceived carpetbaggers, but perhaps there are districts and situations in which this would not be a big issue.
In any event, though “the optics” of SB163 are bad, as they say in politicalspeak, particularly since the bill is coming from none other than Rod Wright’s successor, legislators and voters should not dismiss the proposal out-of-hand.
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