Mathews: California needs to censure the whole idea of censure

It’s consuming the precious time and money of state's local governments.

Let’s censure the whole idea of censure.

Because it’s consuming the precious time and money of California’s local governments.

Censure is the name often given to resolutions, which have little punitive force, that city council or school board members issue against colleagues they don’t like. Why this censure surge? It’s a national fad — censure resolutions are popular in Washington and other state capitals after the censure earlier this year of Burbank Rep. Adam Schiff for the unforgivable crime of impeaching an insurrectionist president.

But my own travel around the state suggests more fundamental reasons for the trend.

First, after the isolation of the pandemic, our elected officials, like the rest of us, are struggling to relate to one another in person. Second, our monstrously myopic society has a quasi-religious obsession with policing expression and tone — even as it tolerates ceaseless violence.

Finally, the censure surge reflects our growing ignorance of democracy. To a stunning degree, many elected officials are finding themselves censured by colleagues for doing what we should want elected leaders to do —  speak their minds, dissent forcefully and fight for transparency.

Censure isn’t always morally wrong. But it’s almost always beside the point — in no small part because it has no legal force behind it. It’s a simple business to say “Bad dog!” to a colleague who barks wrong. It’s much harder to do the democratic work of recalling them from office.

Take the Los Angeles City Council, which made great show of censuring three colleagues caught on tape in a racist conversation. But two of three councilmembers ignored it; one remained in office until his term’s end, and the other is still on the council. If the council wants a substantive response, it could embrace a top-to-bottom reform of a council that , between the tape and rampant corruption uncovered by the FBI, has lost all credibility.

At least in the L.A. case, the censure had something to do with words that were clearly damaging. It’s far more common for censure to target officials who are doing their jobs.

In California, local governments routinely handle important personnel decisions and contract negotiations—with huge consequences for residents—in closed session, and never publicly disclose details. Many censures, like a recent one of Councilmember Karen Macedonio in California City, are for revealing information from closed session that should be public anyway. (In her case, she apologized to a former city manager for how he was treated). But accounts suggest that the real reason Macedonio was censured is that she’s at odds with the three-member majority on the five-person council. Dissenters are typical censure targets.

Indeed, while American democracy is premised on free exchange censures often target speech by elected officials in public meetings. A Ventura councilmember faced censure for criticizing two city staffers during a council meeting. Ventura then spent $75,000 of taxpayer money hiring a law firm to investigate words uttered in front of the council itself. Preposterously, this investigation’s results are considered secret, as a personnel matter.

While speaking in public can get you censured, real criminal offenses by elected officials rarely draw censures because they are handled by the criminal justice system. The Los Angeles City Council didn’t censure member Curren Price after federal charges were filed against him.

It’s far more likely for officials to face censure for basic acts of democracy. In the Orange County city of Cypress, a councilmember was censured and fined $100 last fall for the grave offense for talking to local high school students about politics. She had previously been censured for — you guessed it — publicly disclosing information from closed sessions.

To support censures, local bodies often cite the provisions of their codes of conduct, which often. seem written for kindergartens, not democratic governments.

After Seaside’s City Council considered censuring one councilmember for criticizing his colleagues on downtown revitalization, the city drafted a new code that demanded, impossibly, “At all times, representatives of the city are to be courteous and polite to each other, and everyone they meet.”

There’s good news: censure excesses are forcing a reappraisal. Bad news: “censure reform” can be as ludicrous as censure itself. According to The Daily Post, Palo Alto City Councilmembers proposed reforming the censure procedure to require a super-majority vote, a procedure for councilmembers to defend their behavior, and the establishment of three different tiers of censure.

Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column and is democracy editor of Zócalo Public Square.