Arnold Schwarzenegger appears to take great delight in confounding other politicians - including his supposed allies in the Republican Party.

The governor - who plays politics like he plays chess - shook up the Republicans when, in a series of newspaper interviews, he seemingly opened the door to raising taxes as a way to closing the yawning income-outgo gap in the state budget.

A few days later, however, Schwarzenegger dropped another bomb, offhandedly suggesting that it was time to undo our nearly 40-year-long experiment with a full-time professional Legislature. And this time it hit the Democrats, a party of professional politicians, where they live.

"I want to make the Legislature a part-time Legislature," the governor said in an interview with a Los Angeles Times reporter while vacationing in Hawaii. "Spending so much time in Sacramento, without anything to do, then out of that comes strange bills. I like them when they're scrambling and they really have to work hard. Give them a short period of time. Then good work gets done, rather than hanging. That's when they start getting creative with things."

It was probably more a chesslike move than a vow to lead a reform crusade - a not-so-subtle reminder to the Democrats that the Legislature is still seen by a strong majority of Californians as a dysfunctional, even semicorrupt institution. Voters recalled Schwarzenegger's predecessor, Gray Davis, when his approval ratings dropped into the 20-25 percent range, but at that time, the Legislature's standing was below 20 percent. Had voters been given the chance to toss out the Legislature last October, as well as Davis, they probably would have grabbed it eagerly.

Implicitly, therefore, Schwarzenegger was telling lawmakers that if they fail to follow his lead on a variety of issues, he might generate a popular crusade to reform the legislative branch. At the time he uttered his remarks, Schwarzenegger was dickering with legislators over reform of the workers' compensation system, but they might apply to the budget and anything else on his agenda.

All of that aside, Schwarzenegger did raise a valid question. Has the full-time, professional Legislature, approved by voters in 1966, been an asset or a liability as California confronts massive population growth, economic evolution and cultural change? It's difficult to make an argument for the former, based on the Legislature's sorry performance over the last four decades. While advocates of the full-time Legislature - which included virtually every major political figure of the era - contended that it would lead to more efficient, more responsive and more honest policy-making, in fact just the opposite occurred.

California had achieved great progress in the 1940s and 1950s with a low-paid, part-time Legislature, constructing world-class highway, water, education and parks systems. But as the true professionals, many of them ex-legislative staffers, took over in the 1970s and 1980s, the Legislature imploded, becoming preoccupied with internal politics and campaign fund raising and ignoring the socioeconomic reality beyond Capitol Park.

A federal sting investigation of Capitol corruption and the subsequent indictment and conviction of legislators, staffers and lobbyists underscored the decline of the institution, and voters responded by approving a legislative term-limit measure in 1990. But while term limits have altered the Capitol's culture somewhat, and in some ways beneficially, they have not spawned better governance.

Would returning to a part-time Legislature improve its performance? Probably not, unless it was accompanied by some other structural reforms, such as enlarging the Legislature's membership to shrink the size of districts, having impartial redistricting, and opening up the process to independents and minor parties. Perhaps we should also consider a parliamentary system that would make it more difficult for the Capitol to shirk its duties.

If Schwarzenegger wanted to leave a real legacy, he would champion not only a deep reform of the Legislature, but also an overhaul of the entire bloated, irrational and ineffective system of state and local government and align it with 21st-century reality.