There’s something fascinating about reading the columns of Dan Walters. You get the sense that’s deeply frustrated with how our state’s government fails, but he can never really bring himself to abandon his conservatism to truly diagnose the problems and offer the truly bold solutions this state needs.
His column today is a perfect example of this. He writes about a joint legislative hearing on state reform that, in his mind, didn’t quite articulate the reasons why state government failed. In that I would agree, but for very different reasons.
The most popular prescription, judging by how many times it was mentioned, was loosening up the state’s 19-year-old legislative term limit law. Democrats, Republicans and academics took turns criticizing term limits – six years in the Assembly and eight years in the Senate….
Even setting aside the reality that voters last year rejected modification of term limits, blaming them for the Legislature’s wheel-spinning is revisionist history. Voters adopted them because they perceived, accurately, that the Legislature of the 1980s was ineffective and corrupt, as demonstrated by a federal undercover sting that sent many Capitol denizens to prison.
Walters is misstating some things here. Term limits has always been a close battle – Prop 140 squeaked by with less than 1% in the November 1990 election, and Prop 93 got over 46% of the vote in February 2008. It might have received a majority had it not protected existing incumbents.
And Walters also misstates the reasons why Prop 140 passed. As I remember well, the debate was not about Capitol corruption, but about Capitol liberalism. Specifically, it was a discussion about one person: Speaker Willie L. Brown, Jr. Conservatives knew Willie Brown had their number, knew that San Francisco voters would never kick him out of office, and after the failure of the Gang of Five to remove Brown from office in 1988, it became clear Dems would never throw him overboard either. So SoCal wingnuts like Pete Schabarum put Prop 140 on the ballot to rid the state of Willie Brown. They achieved that goal, and more, causing massive damage to state government.
That all being said, Walters is right to say that term limits is just a tip of the iceberg. Unfortunately, he doesn’t quite get at the real problems:
In reality, California’s governmental dysfunction is much more fundamental than term limits, campaign contributions, gerrymandered legislative seats and other oft-cited factors, even though they have contributed to the institutional malaise.
Bill Lockyer, who’s held state office for 35 years and is now state treasurer, came very close to the truth when he told legislators, “We’re part of a system that was designed not to work.”
Walters doesn’t walk through the door Lockyer opened. If he did, he’d understand that the system was deliberately broken by a specific group of people: conservative Republicans who after 1978 became frustrated with the fact (and it is a fact) that Californians do not share their insane anti-government plutocratic ideology. So they saddled the state with a bunch of rules designed to give themselves veto power over everyone else, and prevent the majority from governing itself.
Walters does mention the 2/3rds rule, but he doesn’t draw the right conclusion from it. The damage that rule does cannot be understood outside the partisan political context. Clear majorities of Californians want to be governed by Democrats and want progressive policies. They will support the right kind of taxes to support the right kind of government services. The perversion of democracy that involves refusing to let the majority govern the state has to be discussed as part of any analysis of the California crisis for that analysis to be credible.
What makes Walters somewhat interesting is his willingness to throw some bombs, instead of simply defending the status quo as George Skelton usually does:
The much-vaunted checks and balances of the American system, designed by the nation’s founders who had revolted against a king and feared centralized power, create stasis in a society with as many rival factions as California has.
What may have worked in post-colonial, mono-cultural America doesn’t work very well in a postindustrial, multicultural state such as California, especially since we’ve added even more hurdles to decision-making, such as ballot measures and two-thirds votes.
Until and unless we realign government to 21st century reality, another Lockyer observation will probably prevail: “You are the captive of this environment, and I don’t see any way out.”
I too am a strong proponent of abandoning the stupid pretense that we can keep the 20th century alive and instead we should orient government, policies, and our worldview toward a 21st century reality. And it may be the case that an 18th century model of governance no longer suits a nation-state like California.
I’m all for exploring something like parliamentizing California government, where we have a unicameral legislature that elects a Prime Minister who fills some, though probably not all, of the slots that currently comprise the executive branch. I’m also down with exploring proportional representation.
But none of that is absolutely necessary at this point in time. The #1 problem with California, the reason our state government is “designed to fail,” is that it has become captive to a small group of wacko ideologues who want government to fail, who want mass poverty, who think Charles Dickens’ description of the 19th century poverty were utopian stories and not calls to progressive action.
To fix California, we must first break the back of that conservative ideology and rally the people of California to rediscover the progressive elements of the California Dream.
The Legislative 2/3 rule is at the heart of the structural problem. Even Joel Fox (albeit trying to prove that nothing needs to be fixed) pointed out in the last couple of weeks that most local tax measures passed the voters. Of course what neither Fox nor Walters will admit that those are actual elections where voters turn out. But the legislature can be tied into knots by the minority and then when they put proposals on the ballots in off elections a small minority ends up deciding. It is the way in which minority rule is built into the legislative process (through Prop 13) that needs to be emphasized.
I think you hit the nail on the head right there. In order to prove that private enterprise it the highest form of life in the universe, the wacko ideologues have to show that government is ineffective. Of course they’ve been singing this song for a long time. But the Bush administration gave them a new opportunity–to privatize large parts of government services like war, and to gut everything else. In doing so, they hoped to prove the point. Instead they let us see that government contractors are no more efficient than government services, and considerably less accountable.
But the lesson was not lost on the wackos. If they can make government fail, it will prove their long-held opinion that government is less efficient at delivering services than private companies. And they’re hoping nobody will notice that it failed because they chocked it to death. So far, it’s working pretty well.
is not simply to prevent tax increases. It empowers the entire corporate/conservative agenda by holding the budget hostage. They use that leverage to cripple consumer and environmental protections, gut labor laws, and keep the oil excise tax at bay. Keeping property taxes down is incidental.
We have to convince our fearful conservative neighbors that power corrupts, and that the 1/3 hegemony held by the GOP in Sacramento has made them the targets of, and prisoners of, corporate campaign money.
I agree 100% that Willie Brown was the sole target of term limits. And again, the current dysfunction only raises the influence of corporate lobbyists.
I’m not sure how to craft the message against term limits. They seem to be an anti-corruption measure on the surface. It would be hard to knock them down while also campaigning against the “corrupting” effects of the 1/3 veto.
One other point about Prop 140 passing by one percentage point. It was helped because many Democrats supported Prop 131 which was a modified and much more reasonable term limits law. The problem of course was that made term limits in general seem more reasonable and helped the Prop 140 campaign. They were also helped because Pete Wilson who was running for Governor that year tied his campaign to Prop 140 and put a lot of money into publicizing it. Ironically Ronald Reagan whom so many Republicans think of as there ultimate role model opposed 140.
He really has no desire to see California’s government reformed or improved. He wants it to simply expire. That’s why he keeps harping on his “parliamentary” system year in and year out. He knows that nothing will happen toward achieving his supposed goal. It’s not a real goal at all. He doesn’t want improvement in our hideous, collapsing system. He wants it to fail utterly. And then he’d call for a military junta.
He’s had little but contempt for California and Californians for decades. He hates California (“it’s cold and it’s damp”) and its people, and in particular, he hates the notion that well-upholstered white men like his own self are neither the majority nor likely to continue being the ruling factor in this state before his life is done.
Dames and The Brown Menace truly threaten him. He would rather see California fall into the sea than to accept a progressive or even liberal California governed by women and brown people.
He’s terrified of what would happen to people like him if the State ever were reformed sufficiently to enable majority rule.