If you want a poster child for everything that’s wrong with government in the Golden State, take a look at the California Citizens Compensation Commission, a body that manages to combine lawlessness and unaccountability in equal measures.

Created by Proposition 112, a constitutional amendment passed by the legislature and approved by voters in 1990, the commission has a single task: to set salaries and benefits for state legislators and constitutional officers.

There is, of course, no more touchy political question than how much politicians should get paid for doing the public’s work. It’s an issue perfect for demagoguery.

So the idea behind Prop 112, as in so much else of what passes for “reform” in California, was to take the politics out of politics. California would shift the duty of setting politicians’ pay away from legislators and the governor and lodge it in an independent commission charged with following neutral, technocratic rules. In a ballot argument signed by officials of reformy groups like Common Cause and the League of Women Voters, voters were told, “Proposition 112 will create a salary commission that specifically cuts out bureaucrats and elected officers and includes average Californians….[T]heir decision will be made in public by people like you.” [Emphasis in original.]

Except the seven people on the commission are in no way like the rest of us. Appointed by the governor to six-year terms, they are not subject to confirmation, and they are accountable to no one. They can do what they like and nobody else has a say.