Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. Proposed Revision Of The Rules. The first question of moment with which the 1913 Legislature had to deal after organization, was the proposed changes in the rules governing each House. That change in the rules is desirable, is admitted. But the changes proposed were so astonishingly radical that the proposals were, in the main, rejected. The rejected provisions, however, indicate the drift of development of the legislative system, and in this find their chief importance. The drift is: (1) Toward a one-house Legislature. (2) Toward curtailing, or at least controlling, newspaper and other comment and criticism of legislative activities. The experience of the 1911 session had been that the governing rules failed to meet the requirements of the Legislature. Because of their indefinite provisions the regularity of the procedure followed in the passage of several important measures was brought into serious question.33 Then again, the Initiative and Referendum amendment to the State Constitution, under which the 1913 Legislature was to convene, required some definite system of procedure in urgency cases requiring the sus- 33 The Local Option bill, for example, was at one time in danger because of the ambiguous wording of the joint rules governing free conference reports. See "Story of the California Legislature of 1911," Chapter XVII, page 213. pension of the referendum provision of the State Constitution.34 A committee of six—consisting of three Senators and three Assemblymen—was accordingly appointed to draw up a set of rules to be presented to the 1913 Legislature. For the Senate, President Wallace appointed Senator Leroy A. Wright35 of San Diego to be chairman of 84 The amendment provides that no act passed by the Legislature shall become effe...