The deadline for filing an initiative that would make the November 2010 ballot is Friday (Just a quick update to that: Friday is a suggested deadline to maximize time for signature gathering) . The initial measures to repeal the 2/3 ballot initiatives filed by Maurice Read failed at the end of July. There is currently an initiative to lower the threshold from 2/3 to 3/5 in circulation, but it does not have any backing.
And that’s it. There is no pending initiative regarding any two-thirds rule, with the institutional support needed to get on the ballot, and the deadline is Friday.
As has been mentioned in a Contra Costa Times article, the political leadership in the CDP appears to be moving away from it.
A split between Democratic activists and the political pros who run the party may be growing over how to approach the issue that has bedeviled the party for years: the two-thirds vote required to pass taxes and budgets in the Legislature.
Most Democrats in the upper echelons of the party apparatus are convinced it’s a fool’s errand to try to persuade voters to hand the majority party unchecked power to raise taxes. Instead, they’re gearing up for a campaign next year to lower the threshold – from two-thirds of both legislative bodies to a simple majority – on budget votes only, a path they believe voters can embrace.
But some grass roots liberals say they’re frustrated with the caution of party leaders and believe, if sold right, voters would hand over both taxing and budgeting powers to the majority party.
“This is a doable thing, but it requires getting Democrats together and deciding to really do it,” said George Lakoff, a UC Berkeley linguistics professor who has become a de facto leader of the cause and is preparing to submit by next week a ballot measure for the November 2010 election that would drop the two-thirds requirement on both taxes and budgets. “Either they want to give the state a future or they can let Republicans continue pushing it into disaster.” […]
But party leaders see him as quixotic, and dismiss his position as misplaced and uninformed.
“People are not ready to pass it,” said John Burton, the Democratic party chairman and a former Senate leader. “He’s got a theory. Good luck to him.”
Mind you, that another guy had a theory before he entered the CDP Chairmanship: John Burton. At the time he committed himself to repealing the 2/3 majority for the budget and taxes, and listed it as a top priority. But I don’t even know that the Burton fallback position is being considered; as of now, they have a little over 48 hours to file a 2/3 repeal on the budget. And of course, this would immediately put half of what a budget is – revenues – off-limits, while taking responsibility for bad budgets that cannot be fixed.
What I have heard now is that, with statewide offices being decided in 2010, party leaders don’t want to put revenue on the ballot and increase GOP turnout against it, threatening their statewide officer candidates.
This is nothing more than a Friedman Unit strategy. We cannot put such a proposal on the ballot in 2010 because it might hurt candidates, so we move it to the next election. Which has candidates in it as well, so we have to just hold off past 2012. But our Governor’s up for re-election/trying to defeat the Republican in 2014, so we have to hold off then, too. As a result, nothing proceeds.
And it’s worse than that. We hear constantly that the public is not ready for a conversation about changing the rule, but in the meantime nothing is being done to prepare the ground for that shift in public opinion. It’s not that we have to give the war a few more months to succeed, as in the Friedman Unit; it’s that we have to give NOTHING more time for voters to, I guess, come up with their own ideas about state government.
The inescapable conclusion you must come to is that everyone in the system actually likes the system as it is. For Democrats, they personally prosper by getting elected and re-elected, and they can always blame the 2/3 rule for whatever failures occur. It’s accountability-free government complete with a scapegoat, and it rocks their world.
We can talk about how Democratic leaders tend to view the electorate as static and unchangeable, rather than the starting point from where opinion can be shaped. We can talk about how small-bore goals or a major crisis can provide the spark for the change the state so desperately needs. But this isn’t a failure of imagination. It’s a general contentment with the status quo.
Which is why change will have to be imposed upon the system from the outside. The most intriguing initiatives to date are the one pushed by Lenny Goldberg to repeal the $2 billion dollar a year corporate tax breaks, and the proposal for a Constitutional convention (though that has also not gone into circulation by the Bay Area Council, but only through an independent effort from Paul Currier). This obviously cannot be left to anyone in Sacramento – they will always find a convenient excuse for delay.
September 25th is not a hard deadline. It is the last day to file an initiative to ensure the proponents have the maximum amount of time to gather signatures. You can file after September 25th, but you would have less time to get the signatures.
I also believe there is a grassroots group affiliated with Lakoff that will be filing a majority vote initiative on both budget and revenue.
I will be posting my own thoughts on this later in the afternoon. I don’t disagree with some of these assessments. I am distressed by the willingness of some Democrats to maintain the political view of the last 30 years, that to talk taxes is to jeopardize Dem gains and therefore you just shouldn’t do it.
I don’t see it so much as contentment with the status quo, though the preservation of that status quo is definitely the byproduct, so much as it’s an unwillingness to or a lack of faith in their ability to try and win the bigger victories. Many of the party establishment know how to win elections, they don’t know how to win messaging or policy battles, so they stick to what they know, despite the fact that it brings diminishing returns.
it can only be done by going over the heads of the legislators, most of whom will always place their perceived self-interest over the larger, long-term interest of the public. That’s just the name of the game, as far as they are concerned.
Repealing the 2/3 rules threatens the legislators, because they would actually have to do their jobs, and be held accountable for them, without blaming the ongoing disaster on someone else. The Dems would either have to raise taxes, to put the money where their mouths are, or else face backlash from their base when they prove that all their talk about the great state of California was just hot air.
The good news is that once the propositions are on the ballot, the Democratic legislators will have to support them — or explain to Democratic primary voters why they are opposed to majority rule.
That is, unfortunately, the reason propositions are so popular in California. While they are often used to disastrous results, they are almost always seen as a way to circumvent too-timid politicians. This may be another case in point. And I agree they will fall in line if it seems to be succeeding.