Timm Herdt at the VC Star has a great profile of Kenneth Burt (a really sincere, good guy) of the California Federation of Teachers and his idea for a majority vote measure focused only on the budget. There is a lot of background here. As we’ve been trying to get majority vote for both revenue and budget for a long time, the story is a complicated one.
But, for the more recent history, you have to look back to at least 2004, when Prop 56 took a beating as it tried to change the threshold for both budget and revenue to 55%. Say what you want about how that initiative was managed, and there could really be a book about that, but it went down in flames. Chapters could include 55% vote vs simple majority, media strategy, and ads, to name a few. That being said, it did put a whole chunk of fear into left-leaning organizations vis a vis reducing the supermajority measures at the ballot. Burt and AFT, along with AFSCME, were not deterred and think it was an overall success:
Over the objections of progressive Democrats who wanted to take another shot at a majority-vote-for-everything initiative, Burt and his allies stuck with the art-of-the-possible approach.
He is the first to admit that the majority-vote budget signed by Gov. Jerry Brown last week isn’t pretty. The spending reductions it includes are painful and regrettable, he says.
But the majority-vote budget allowed two important things to happen, Burt argues.
First, it allows school districts and local governments to make their plans for the coming year without being placed in a summer-long limbo, guessing what the state budget might look like.
Secondly, he says, “It prevented Republicans from demanding more special-interest corporate tax breaks in return for their votes.”(VC Star)
Success is best judged more than a few weeks out from the process, but I think it is pretty hard to argue that that budget is any kind of success.
I was at an event a few years ago where Alberto Torrico and Loni Hancock were debating the merits of a majority vote measure, but they differed on the question of whether to include revenue. As we’ve seen, the budget part was clearly possible, but what really happened is that Democrats now did the Republicans dirty work.
Republicans just sit on the sideline, demanding crazy stuff, and then proceed to do pretty much nothing. Meanwhile, the Democrats have to do what they didn’t want to do all along, with no support outside the party. So the Republicans got the cuts-only budget they’ve been wanting for years, and had to lay nothing on the line. And then when election time comes around, they rally against the cuts to county services, demanding that the state return money to the counties. Or, some idiot wants to secede because his County lost some Vehicle License Fee money. Interesting that said idiot wasn’t calling for secession when we cut the VLF under Schwarzenegger and couldn’t pay for it.
So, for the short-term, Prop 25 got us a budget. An ugly budget, but a budget nonetheless. Whether it was good for California in the long-run is still to be decided.
I think Leubitz (like Obama and Dems in general) miss the importance of narrative here. The narrative is that majority-rule works. After 30+ years of Republican obstruction, California passes majority-rule budget and then we have an on-time budget. This adds credence to the narrative (note that Republicans always repeat the narrative about lower taxes promoting growth, even though the experiences of the 90’s and the 00’s indicate the opposite).
If the Dems are smart (big assumption), they will put on the ballot for 2012 a constitutional amendment that lowers the threshold for revenue increases to simple majority of both houses for educational means. Why just education? Because it can pass. The Republican narrative over the last 50 years (Nixon’s Southern Strategy) has that blacks sap the economy through welfare (now it’s Latinos, but don’t worry, there will always be another group to scapegoat). White Californians don’t want to help minorities (or poor people, for that matter), but education is another matter.
At a luncheon the Democratic Party Progressive Caucus put together at an executive board meeting a few years ago, Alberto Torrico said a move to majority vote on the budget alone would force the Democrats to do the Republicans’ dirty work. He said not to work for it because, without the ability to raise revenues, the only option would be brutal cuts. As the majority party, the Democrats would have to pass them, and would be blamed for them. As you note, he was right.