With the collapse of the Schwarzenegger/Nuñez health care plan, the obvious inequities in a broken system continue.  And legislators who have the motive, means, and opportunity to do what they can to reverse that have an obligation.  Here’s what I wrote in Speaker Nuñez’ diary on the day of the Senate Health Committee vote:

…for whatever reason, your compromise isn’t going to pass today.  Now do you stamp your feet and wag a finger at those who submarined it and sit in the corner, or do you work to enact something that would be meaningful to California’s many uninsured.  That’s the position of the moment, and so don’t tell us why others have messed up your deal, tell us what you’re going to do right now to pick up the pieces and move on.

I’d start with guaranteed issue, confidentially.

I am disappointed to report that the Speaker has gone the stamping of feet route.

Núñez suggested that support for a government-run, “single-payer” system lurked in the background and wound up undermining AB X1 1.

Schwarzenegger vetoed a government-run proposal in 2006. Another single-payer measure, Senate Bill 840 by Sen. Sheila Kuehl, D-Santa Monica, is pending in the Assembly.

Núñez vowed to subject it to the same kind of scrutiny his now-dead plan received. “I think it’s time,” he said, “for us to have an honest conversation about single payer.”

He said that lawmakers “cannot create the false sense of hope that we can do something better if it hasn’t been tested and put through the same type of scrutiny that our effort was put through.”

What good is this “You drank my milkshake, now I drink your milkshake!” strategy?  Is it really worth it to 6.5 million uninsured Californians to react to the demise of one health care plan by bulldozing another health care plan?  This solipsism, the lashing out, the power plays, is exactly what’s wrong with Sacramento.

The lessons of 1994 are that a combination of bad timing and the lack of openness in the process is what killed the Clinton health care plan.  That’s exactly what derailed this plan, and the proper response is to fix the eternal budgeting problems that will always make an overhaul supremely difficult, and to build a coalition that includes the grassroots in a deliberative way.  The opportunity is going to be there if the budgeting structure is righted.  But the CDP would need to get behind it on the ground.  The groups that do appear, and let me stress that word, appear to be holding out for single payer, need to be brought into the process rather than assailed.  There are national allies like MoveOn and the Campaign for America’s Future and the whole of the progressive movement that could be invited into the process.  And there are small-bore reforms that we could enact right now, that would prepare the ground very well for a national program like Ron Wyden’s Healthy Americans Act or the proposals of the Democratic candidates, which have a much more stable federal fiscal structure on which to balance.

Too much of this process has been focused on tearing each other apart, and it’s very upsetting to see the leadership continuing down that path.

If 1-2% of all voters can whittle the field down to two candidates, and deliver a nominee on the Republican side, we have a serious problem and everyone knows it.  I think this debate over whether or not California matters has been completely misunderstood.  My degradation of California moving up was a focus on the PROCESS, not some animus against California.  The process sucks.  It needs to be reformed in a big way.  The fact that Florida broke the rules, moved up, delivered no delegates on the Dem side, but obviously succeeded since they PICKED THE REPUBLICAN NOMINEE, should tell you something.  We need a spread-out process and maybe earlier conventions to end this bad front-loaded system.  It’s terrible for democracy.  It should not continue for one more election.

Antonio is still a favorite to be the next governor, so this is a unique opportunity to see how he’d respond to a budget crisis:

Faced with a budget shortfall that has doubled in three months, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa called Monday for paring city spending by suspending most hiring, asking thousands of workers to take unpaid furloughs and selling vacant fire stations […]

Despite the troubling financial situation, Villaraigosa pledged to continue his 1,000-officer expansion of the Los Angeles Police Department — an effort he called key to attracting business, even if it means cutting other services such as street paving and graffiti removal.

“My priority has got to be public safety,” Villaraigosa said at a City Hall news conference. “Keeping the city safe is the answer to how we support revenues.”

Villaraigosa outlined $35 million in cuts as he made a pitch for Proposition S, a telephone users utility tax that is expected to generate $243 million annually. Voters will decide the issue next Tuesday, and the mayor has been arguing that the city will have to slash public safety services if the measure fails.

So, fairly flat taxes to fund public safety (which is among the bigger expenditures for a mayor), a threat to cut public safety if it fails, and cuts across the board beyond that.  It’s not perfect to apply this to what he would do in the Governor’s chair, because the state obviously has a far better opportunity to raise revenue.  But it’s food for thought.

I’ve found myself wistful over the demise of health care reform in California, if only because it was so painful to watch.  It was fairly glaring from the start that the resources and the budget structure weren’t there to manage such a big issue.  The lesson learned should be that a broader consensus has to be reached, but also that you have to work within the narrow structures forced by the state’s processes, or else work to change them.  Such is also the case with prison reform, which is actually a far less insurmountable a goal.

About a week ago we heard about a potential “deal” on solving the prison crisis, where the state would settle the lawsuits that are forcing the possibility of a dramatic release of prisoners.  But notice how this is being done.  It’s a “deal” without reform.

over..

SACRAMENTO — Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s administration is exploring a settlement of two lawsuits that would require California to dramatically reduce the number of inmates in its overcrowded prisons — and limit the Legislature’s influence on the issue, according to participants in the discussions.

The settlement discussions in the federal court cases, which have been consolidated, are in an early stage, and the framework of a deal has not been ironed out.

The talks are not formally tied to Schwarzenegger’s proposal last week to release tens of thousands of low-risk prisoners to save the state money. That plan, which essentially reverses the court position he has taken opposing the early release of inmates, is expected to die in the Legislature, where it would need approval from Republicans who adamantly oppose it.

But it could become the basis for a negotiated settlement, prisoners’ lawyers said.

The proposal is “a step in the right direction,” said Donald Specter, director of the nonprofit Prison Law Office and one of the attorneys for inmates in the case. His group is asking a panel of three federal judges to cap the state’s prison population.

“We would rather settle this case and have the state do this than have the court do it,” Specter said.

Even if lawmakers reject his proposal, Schwarzenegger could implement the inmate releases he envisions as part of a settlement, known as a consent decree, that the judges would approve. That would put extreme pressure on legislators to make the appropriate changes to state law.

This has nothing to do with reforming a broken system, just as the absurd attempt to build our way out of the problem last year did nothing.  It’s the draconian sentencing and parole issues that are leading to overcrowding, a shortage of rehabilitation and treatment services, and the country’s largest recidivism rate.  This is completely obvious.  Here’s a quick statistic: California has 30 times as many children between the ages of 14 and 17 in prison for life without the possibility of parole than THE ENTIRE REST OF THE WORLD COMBINED.  There’s actually a bill, SB999 (Yee), that would end this horrific practice.  But it’s by no means the only outsized sentence that we have on the books.

You can go back and forth on who should get released and what crimes should be absolved, and politicians, Democrats and Republicans alike, can demagogue the issue and scare the bejeebus out of their constituents with lurid tales of “criminals roaming our streets,” but what they won’t tell you is that this is a problem of their own doing.  By sentencing nonviolent offenders to overcrowded jails that become little more than schools on how to commit violent crimes, they are threatening public safety and risking a total collapse of the system.  Only by attacking this crisis at the root will anything be solved.  And in this way, it mirrors the health care debate.  The Governor is seeking a “deal” with a narrow group of interests without looking at the larger problems in the debate.  In health care it was costs; in prison reform it’s sentencing.

The 45 days allowed by Proposition 58 for the legislature to act in this special session and the urgency of the situation may bring about some thoughtful policy in this area or it may prove an impossibility and devolve into a new orgy of demagoguery and what our Governor calls “Kabuki theater”-a stylized and ritualized play on the stage of politics where our elected leaders try to prove they are tougher on crime. Given how we have gotten into this mess, with the constant one-upmanship of over 1000 laws passed ratcheting up sentences for all sorts of crimes since 1977 when California switched to a determinate sentencing law scheme (fixed terms rather than leaving some discretion in sentencing and releasing criminals with an eye towards rehabilitation), I am somewhat dubious. California is now responsible for 1 out of every 5 new inmates in the country in prison. Some Republicans in the legislature still don’t get it. Tomorrow, during the regular session, the Assembly Public Safety Committee will take up at least two proposals to increase sentences and add to that list of 1000.

The failure of leadership in this area is truly sad to see.  And until we actually address these sundry problems in a comprehensive way that looks at root causes instead of playing to what we think citizens want to hear, that leadership deficit will widen.

((bumped, as reports come in of AB X 1 1 failing 10-1 in committee.  In the end, even Don Perata announced that he could not support the bill. – promoted by David Dayen)

It looks like the dream of major health care reform is over in California, at least for this year.  The LA Times reports:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s yearlong effort to arrange medical insurance for nearly all Californians will be rejected by a state Senate panel this afternoon, according to people familiar with the decision.

The move would effectively kill one of the governor’s most ambitious policy goals.

Senate President Don Perata (D-Oakland) made the decision after canvassing Democratic senators over the weekend and finding almost no support for the measure, which the Assembly passed last month.

There was some thought that Perata would use some parliamentary maneuvers to ensure the bill’s passage, but apparently he couldn’t find anyone to create a majority for the measure.

Anthony York openly wonders whether or not this spells the end of the current leadership structure in the state Legislature.

But watching the California Legislature in action last week felt like watching the end of an era — and bearing witness to the creation of a power vacuum. In a political ballet that played out over several days, the prospects for two seemingly unrelated but intimately connected political issues — a healthcare reform bill and a change in the state’s term-limits law — withered simultaneously. And as their fortunes sank, so did the power of the current legislative leadership […]

Then more bad news for the healthcare bill. Mid-afternoon Wednesday, Gloria Negrete McLeod (D-Chino) announced that she too was voting against the legislation, citing concerns about the affordability of the mandated insurance.After her vote, a senator who sits on the committee characterized the situation as a “total implosion.” He told me that the rumored poll numbers on Proposition 93 were making it harder to get the healthcare bill out of committee. If the prospects for the initiative’s passage were as bad as the numbers suggested, he said, the stigma of a lame duck, and a corresponding loss of influence, might attach to Perata and Nuñez.

Let me say that health care reform may end in California for now, but it does not end nationally, and indeed one has little effect on the other.  This is still something in which Americans are broadly in favor.  And it’s still a framework that every Democratic candidate has laid out.  With a new Democratic President, health care reform will be at the top of the agenda, and at the federal level it has a far greater chance of being fiscally sustainable.  There are still significant measures that could be taken in California that would improve conditions, in particular mandating guaranteed issue and expanding public programs.  But the perils and pitfalls of balancing an enormous overhaul on an unsteady budgetary picture proved too great.

UPDATE: Ezra Klein, echoing a familiar theme:

I’m not shocked, or even particularly saddened, by this. It never really looked to me like the finances worked out, and though the political coalition around the bill was heartening and impressive, the rabid dead-enders of the Californian GOP (they’re actually worse than national Republicans) wouldn’t allow even a cent of new money, and without a truly stable funding source, you really can’t do this at the state level. Indeed, money is why all these state plans fail. For fiscal reasons, this has to be a federal initiative. Because states are more politically flexible than the federal government, they can often seem a more viable arena for health reform. But the policies always collapse.

So Barbara Boxer is not sitting on her heels waiting for a new President, she’s acting boldly to reverse Stephen Johnson’s horrible EPA decision blocking California from regulating tailpipe emissions.

Senate environmental committee Chair Barbara Boxer (D-CA) has introduced a bill that would overrule EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson and instruct him to grant California’s waiver.

Right out of the gate, it’s got bipartisan support. Cosponsors include Senators Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), Joseph Lieberman (ID, CT), Hillary Clinton (D-NY), Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ), Benjamin Cardin (D-MD), Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Edward Kennedy (D-MA), Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Christopher Dodd (D-CT), John Kerry (D-MA), Barbara A. Mikulski (D-MD), Olympia Snowe (R-ME), Susan Collins (R-ME), Bill Nelson (D-FL), Barack Obama (D-IL), and Robert Menendez (D-NJ).

It was fairly certain that litigation would reach the same result, or that a Democratic President would order the EPA to reverse the decision.  But that would take quite a while, and in the interim, the climate deteriorates even further.

By the way, this Johnson character is a first-class nutter:

Shortly before Stephen L. Johnson was sworn in by President Bush as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, he gave the president a towel symbolizing a New Testament passage in which Jesus washes his disciples’ feet. The towel, given to graduates of Johnson’s alma mater, a small evangelical college, symbolizes a life of Christian service.

Like the president, Johnson is a deeply religious man who says he relies on his faith in his work. Johnson prayed and spoke gratefully of early-morning prayer sessions held in his government office in a promotional video filmed there for an offshoot of a worldwide Christian ministry.

We’ll see if Boxer can get what would be a needed 67 votes to overcome a Bush veto.  But good for her for trying to accelerate the process.

Do check out Sean Siperstein at Warming Law’s liveblog of today’s events in the Senate Environment Committee, where Barbara Boxer and others made EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson squirm for quite a while this morning.

The background, including Boxer’s finding that the EPA staff favored the granting to California of the waiver for them to regulate tailpipe emissions, is here and here.  More on today’s session is here and here, including the hilarious admission that the EPA used duct tape to redact documents about their decision-making process.

BOXER: Colleagues, this is the tape, this is the tape that was put over – finally the administration had a way to use duct tape. This administration, this is what they did to us. They put this white tape over the documents and staff had to stand here. It’s just unbelievable. […]

I mean what a waste of our time. This isn’t national security. This isn’t classified information, colleagues. This is information the people deserve to have. And this is not the way we should run the greatest government in the world. It does not befit us. So that’s why I’m worked up about it and think we have been treated in a very shabby way.

Even Lieberman was laying into Johnson on this one.  What an embarrassment.