Why everybody hates politicians

A friend writes -

Not that Los Angeles city politics concern you, but the principles in this one are hysterically fucked up. Long-story short the LA City Council who have raised parking ticket rates and made parking meters run 24 hours including sundays, recently voted that all LA City Council members be EXEMPT from parking tickets. WHAAAAAAAAAA?????

This doesn't surprise me- from what I recall, the LA City Council is ridiculous, they've done an awful job managing the city, and get paid more than members of congress (almost $180k/year). The whole American system of government is built upon general applicability of the law - what keeps legislators from making bad laws is the fact that they're enforced on the legislators as well. I think that you could make a decent case that the fines coupled with the exemption for the council members violates the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment. Given that parking law violators are not a protected class (like racial minorities, say), the court would look to see whether the Council had a rational basis for passing a law that treats similarly situated people (a city council member with a ticket and a regular guy with a ticket) differently. I have a hard time thinking of anything validfor a general exemptionI can understand not ticketing, say, police cars, or cars that might have to double-park once in a while on city business or something... but council members' private cars (particularly when I'm sure that the council has a lovely free parking garage at city hall)?

Alternately, I'd say that any candidate running against a council member who voted for it should bring a rain of populist hell down on the incumbent. In NYC, the city council last year overrode a public referendum in order to extend term limits from 2 terms to 3, (largely so they - and the mayor - could keep their jobs). It was really unpopular, and a number of council members lost their seats because of that vote. I'd say the parking tickets exemption is politically an even bigger issue, because it's completely indefensible - at least with term limits there's a general "I think term limits are bad policy" defense to the charge that you did it purely out of self interest.

The problem with that is that, just like in NYC, nobody in Los Angeles has any idea who his or her councilmember is, or what they're up to. LA has something like 3-4 million people, and 15 city council members, so each one is representing hundreds of thousands of people. The lack of accountability pretty much means that these folks can do what they want without much chance that they'll be called on it.