Arnold Schwarzenegger’s official call for a special session covered the topics of health care and water, but not redistricting, as was suspected earlier.  So, with no bill coming from the legislature yesterday either, redistricting is apparently dead for this legislative session.  The major players appeared to agree on the broad principles of a reform, but the devil was in the details, specifically the makeup of the independent redistricting commission and whether Congressional districts should be included in that redistricting (Nancy Pelosi says a big no to that one).  Dan Walters explains how this proposal’s absence from the February ballot may impact the other major initiative on it:

Democratic leaders, it’s evident, are mainly interested in persuading voters to modify term limits via a measure on the Feb. 5 primary election ballot and entertained redistricting reform only because Schwarzenegger, a longtime advocate of reform, indicated that he would not support, and perhaps oppose, the term limit measure were it not accompanied by a redistricting measure […]

The decision to abandon reform may be good news for those who didn’t want it, including Pelosi and most Democratic Party interest groups, but it may also make it more difficult for those same interests to persuade voters to change term limits because it raises the possibility of opposition from the popular governor.

Schwarzenegger was noncommittal Tuesday about what position he would take on changing term limits but it’s highly unlikely that he’ll endorse the measure, and he may oppose it. And with polls indicating that voters are somewhat ambivalent on term limit modification, Schwarzenegger’s position could be critical to the outcome.

I don’t totally buy that Schwarzenegger is a kingmaker in the initiative process – how did he do in 2005 – but clearly his opposition wouldn’t help.  I can’t see him ACTIVELY campaigning against it, however, especially with his former advisor Matthew Dowd on the term limits reform team.

I remain skeptical that redrawing districts with any geographic specificity would change the partisan makeup of those districts in any meaningful way.  People self-segregate and the broad changes in regions happen because of demographic shifts, not boundary-drawing.  It’s notable that the vaunted Texas redistricting “scheme” (which actually was correcting an earlier gerrymander) has produced just half the results that were expected.

Perata declined to take up the issue in a special session because it’s not an urgent issue.  He’s right.  In fact it would be dysfunctional to use 2000-era data to redraw districts in 2008.  This should be taken up with a new governor after a new Census in 2010.  And Pelosi shouldn’t be so stubborn – many of her compadres don’t need a 70% cushion in their districts, and furthermore it would be impossible to make places like the Bay Area or Lo Angeles vulnerable.  Plus it’s symbolically good for democracy not to have the legislators pick their voters.

As expected, Governor Schwarzenegger vetoed a bill that would have placed a vote on removing our troops from Iraq on the February 2008 ballot.

(as an aside, it wouldn’t likely matter in this case, but there is no veto override in California, which it seems to me vests an unbalanced amount of power in the executive)

Here’s Arnold’s statement on the veto:

To the Members of the California State Senate:

I am returning Senate Bill 924 without my signature.

All Californians want the safe and swift return of our troops. That said, public opinion polls have confirmed again and again that Californians are sharply divided, as are all
Americans, as to when and how our troops should be withdrawn. We do not need an advisory ballot to understand this deep divide.

The decision to engage in or withdraw troops from war is a federal issue, not a state issue. Few decisions are more difficult for Members of Congress and the President. All
Californians have the right and the means to speak their mind on matters of such national importance.

In fact, California moved up its presidential primary to February 5th to give California voters a greater voice in selecting their party’s presidential candidate. There is no louder message Californians can send to Washington on the Iraq war than who should lead our nation.

Placing a non-binding resolution on Iraq on the same ballot, when it carries no weight or authority, would only further divide voters and shift attention from other critical issues that must be addressed.

For these reasons, I am returning this bill without my signature.

Far from being a “squeeze” for Schwarzenegger, in my view this was utterly predictable and his rhetoric is consistent with his post-partisan reinvention; furthermore, he’s right that it’s a federal issue, and all of us who screamed about “nonbinding” Iraq resolutions shouldn’t be particularly angry that we won’t get to vote on a nonbinding one ourselves.  It’s obviously silly to veto a ballot measure because it would “divide” voters.  Any election divides voters!  But the rest of the statement is on pretty solid ground.

To truly impact the Iraq war, we need to put pressure on our legislators who actually have a vote, as they’re doing in Fresno with Bush Dog Jim Costa.  If we get every Democrat in the state on board with a “no funding without a timeline pledge, we force the Republicans to round up their own votes if they want to pass a blank check.  I’m assuming your representatives have already heard from you on this one.  They should hear from you again.

Sentencing reform is one of the many bills on the docket today, which looks to be the last day for the California Legislature, though that’s subject to change.  In my view this is the signature issue the legislature faces: will they step up and respond to an crisis, or will they cower in the face of having to be “tough on crime” and reject anything but building our way out of the prison problem.  Frank Russo defines the terms here.  Basically there are two bills, each of which has passed their respective chamber.  SB 110 (by Sen. Gloria Romero) calls for an independent sentencing commission without restrictions on what sentences they can look at; AB 160 appears to restrict anything passed through the initiative process, which shields three strikes.  Apparently there’s a third bill in the mix:

• Both SB 110 (Romero), which failed on the Assembly floor 34 to 38 and which can be brought up under reconsideration, and AB 160 (Lieber), which had been holed up in the Senate Rules Committee and has been sprung to the Senate floor, can be voted on. If Romero’s bill advances, there is a play with AB 1708 (Swanson) on the Senate floor that could amend SB 110, clean it up, and perhaps make it more acceptable to the Assembly. Both houses of the legislature have passed fairly similar sentencing commission bills, although with heated debates and opposition from Republicans.

Whether it’s intra-legislative jealousy between the chambers or a desire to look tough to voters, if nothing moves on sentencing today, our representatives will have a lot to answer for.  This is worth a phone call to your Assemblymember and Senator today.

(AB 8 is on the floor of the Assembly right now. – promoted by Brian Leubitz)

There are other things going on besides the Petraeus/Crocker testimony today, though I’m not covering much of it.  But this is kind of important for the future of our nation on its most valued domestic policy.  Over the past few days in California rumblings of a health care deal was moving into focus.  Dan Weintraub that this would result in a deal between the Governor and the Legislature on a workable reform featuring shared responsibility from hospitals, individuals, employers and doctors, with the funding for said deal to be delivered in a ballot measure later on.  Here’s the way it would go:

The legislation would outline a program requiring nearly everyone in California to buy insurance, with subsidies for people making less than four times the federal poverty rate, or about $80,000 a year for a family of four. Insurers would have to cover everyone who applied, regardless of pre-existing conditions, and could not charge customers more because they had been sick in the past.

The subsidies, along with an expansion of free care for the poorest of the poor, would be financed by a new payroll tax, an increase in the sales tax, a special fee on hospitals and an infusion of federal money. The new state charges would be put before the voters because they would require a two-thirds vote for approval in the Legislature, where Republicans have vowed en masse to oppose any increase in taxes or fees.

But before such a deal can be reached, Democrats might send Schwarzenegger legislation that would place the entire burden for expanding access to insurance on employers — an approach the governor has already said he would reject. Labor union supporters of the Democrats may want to force Schwarzenegger’s hand on that issue before any discussions about a compromise can occur.

Once Schwarzenegger vetoes that bill, if it comes to him, he would call the Legislature back into a special session to focus on health care and a handful of other issues. If that happens, the governor’s aides believe they could reach agreement with lawmakers relatively quickly.

If so, such a deal would set the stage for a ballot measure campaign in 2008 that would promise Californians two things: an expansion of health insurance to millions of people who lack coverage today and protections against losing coverage for people who already have it.

Well, let’s take a look at what happened today.  An amended AB8, with positive movement on affordability and cost containment, received the support of health care experts and top labor groups.  The Senate and Assembly schedules a vote for today which has only an employer-based pay mechanism.  And the governor pledged to both veto it and call a special session.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said today he will call a special session of the state Legislature to deal with health care, as lawmakers prepared to debate a Democratic plan he has pledged to veto […]

“What everyone wants, and what we all want, is access to health care so it is affordable and so that everyone can have health care, and no one ever has to worry about it again, that they maybe have to file for personal bankruptcy because they have to stay in a hospital for a few days,” Schwarzenegger said at the University of California, Los Angeles. “So we are working on this right now. We’re going to have an extended session, a special session that we are calling today.”

Schwarzenegger says the Democrats’ bill asks too much of employers, while they reject his demand that health insurance be mandatory.

Sounds like Weintraub got some good information.  The question is whether the resolution will wind up as Weintraub suggests it.  If so, this entire move by the Democratic leadership and their allies in labor has been an enormous kabuki dance.  They get a chance to say they tried it their way but they just had to compromise with the governor, when it seems this may have been part of the deal all along.

Maybe we’ll get meaningful health care reform out of a special session.  But I’m not terribly optimistic.

UPDATE: In addition, it’s not clear to me that having 50 separate health care deals in 50 states is a desirable outcome.

The State Assembly rejected the only sensible reform that would do anything to deal with the root causes of a prison crisis that has been built by 30 years of progressively draconian sentencing laws.  SB110 (Romero) would have created an independent sentencing commission with the ability to rewrite sentencing laws outside of a political culture obsessed with “tough on crime” poses.  Everybody with even a modicum of understanding of the prison crisis knows that the overcrowding (at a time when crime is down) is a direct result of mandatory minimums and three strikes and the multitudes of nonviolent offenders serving long sentences in our jails, some as a result of the War on (some kinds of) Drugs.

Now, there is a bill, AB160 by Sally Lieber, voted out of the Assembly earlier this year, that is similar to the bill Sen. Romero authored.  But, there are some substantive differences, otherwise how do you understand these quotes:

Romero likened the defeat of her bill to the Legislature’s throwing up its hands and telling federal judges to take control of the troubled prison system.

Don Specter, an attorney with the inmate advocate group Prison Law Office, said the vote “certainly emphasizes the one-dimensional approach California has to crime, which is to build more prisons.”

You can read the Romero bill and the Lieber bill, still pending in the State Senate (It passed the appropriate committee by a 9-7 vote).  The Lieber bill can’t touch sentences established through the initiative process (so this is probably about saving three strikes from scrutiny).  The Romero bill would have made recommendations to amend those types of sentences.  Overall the Romero bill is more comprehensive.  This could be some kind of petty jealousy between the chambers.

Hopefully the Senate shows some leadership and passes the Lieber bill, which would at least move things in the right direction.  Until then, on the flip I’m going to list those Democrats who would rather hang on to their little fiefdoms of “tough on crime” sentencing than enact the only proper reform to deal with a crisis that now will almost certainly be handled by the courts.

Voting No:

Arambula, AD-31 (Fresno)
Fuentes, AD-39 (Sylmar) (WHAT???)
Galgiani, AD-17 (Tracy)
Lieu, AD-53 (Torrance)
Nava, AD-35 (Santa Barbara)
Parra, AD-30 (Hanford)
Salas, AD-79 (Chula Vista)
Torrico, AD-20 (Fremont)

Absent, Abstaining, or Not Voting (occasionally a craven tactic often so they can say that they didn’t vote against it):

Charles Calderon, AD-58 (Whittier)
De Leon, AD-45 (Los Angeles)
Karnette, AD-54 (Long Beach)
Levine, AD-40 (Van Nuys) (Maybe he was absent, but EXCUSE ME????)
Wolk, AD-8 (Davis)

These legislators need to answer to their constituents and explain why they want to keep an unsustainable and broken prison system alive.  Furthermore, the leadership needs to explain why they failed to whip the proper number of votes to get this reform passed.

There are a bunch of things that I wanted to post about that I might as well highlight in one post, kind of like when Asia recruited members of Yes, King Crimson, and Uriah Heep to create a “supergroup”:

• BeDevine notes that yet another gender-neutral marriage bill has passed the Legislature, and once again Arnold Schwarzenegger has vowed to veto it because “the people have already spoken on that issue.”  Apparently the people don’t vote for their own representatives in the state legislature.  And at what point does the statute of limitations run out on referring to a ballot measure from 2000?

• Senator Loewenthal has pulled back the container fee bill that would have charged importers a $30 fee on each cargo container to go towards fighting pollution at the ports.  This will go into negotiation and probably be passed in some form in 2008.  Hopefully it’ll be a form that will still have some teeth.

• Dan Weintraub makes the fallacious argument that the United Farm Workers are somehow betraying their principles by asking for the ability to form a union after a majority of employees sign cards endorsing it.  He thinks that there’s no intimidation in a secret ballot election, apparently ignoring decades of union busting, threats, and workplace closures that have arisen from attempts to unionize.

• As mentioned in the Quickies, the CA Hospital Association has agreed to a tax in themselves… sort of.  In exchange, they would receive money back to them based on how many poor people they treat.  Most hospitals would actually make money on the deal.  It’s also hard to see how this would do anything to fix our state’s strained emergency rooms, which presumably is where these poor people would be encouraged to go for treatment.

• Also in the Quickies is some good news on the enviroment, as new CARB chief Mary Nichols has set some pretty strong targets for emissions cuts.  They’re first steps but they presage positive developments in the future.

• Finally, the Teamsters waged a successful protest at the California-Mexico border against the Bush Administration effort to allow 100 Mexican trucking companies to deliver goods anywhere in the United States.  This will not only damage our environment and public safety by opening up the roads to unsafe Mexican trucks, it undermines American job security for one of the few good union industries left to our working class.  The goal is to marginalize unionized truckers, pure and simple.  Matt Stoller thinks this could be the next “Dubai ports deal” if the word gets out about it.

I’m starting a new series here at Calitics.  We’ve seen with the budget fight and the difficulties funding health care reform that the current balance of power in the Legislature just isn’t cutting it.  This is particularly irksome because they daylight is clearly seen at the end of the tunnel.  5 Assembly seats and just 2 Senate seats would bring 2/3 majorities in those chambers, and yet there is little or no talk within Democratic circles of explicitly going after the vulnerable seats within reach that would give us those numbers.

Well, you shouldn’t wait for others tomorrow to begin what you can do today.  So I’m going to be profiling districts and candidates that can get us to what should be the overriding goal of 2/3 majorities.

We begin today in California’s 80th Assembly District, which largely covers the desert region around Palm Springs, Cathedral City and Indian Wells, but which encompasses Imperial County all the way down to the Mexico border.  This district is currently held by Republican and hot Latina Bonnie Garcia, yet there are a plurality of Democrats there.  This is the most Democratic seat held by a term-limited Republican, though obviously that term limit can be overturned.  But regardless, this seat represents an opportunity.  And I met with the man who can not only deliver that seat, but who can give rise to a new movement of young people of color devoted to improving the lives of their constituents.

That man is Manuel Pérez.

I met with Manuel at a coffee shop in Indio, a working-class town surrounded by the posh hotels and golf courses of the Palm Springs area.  It really is a haves versus the have-nots story, with resorts fighting with growers for water resources from the Colorado River, to name just one pressure point.  When you move into Imperial County, where the population is 75% Latino and over 65% speak Spanish as their first language, that dichotomy is even more stark.  In this environment, someone with ties to the land is crucial.  And Pérez’ history goes back generations.

Manuel Pérez’ parents were immigrants who met in the fields while chasing the crops they picked for work.  His mother worked 26 years in the fields, despite raising a family.  His father became a veteraño (a veteran of the migrant fields) and worked for the city of Indio on water issues.  Growing up in Coachella and Calexico, Manuel worked in the fields himself over the summers when he wasn’t in school.  His parents understood the importance of education, teaching the values of “service and sacrifice and social justice,” and pushing him to advance as far as he could go.  At an early age, he saw a community of gangs and drugs where his best friend was killed in a drive-by shooting. 

He became the only person in his family to go on to higher education, getting his bachelor’s degree at UC-Riverside (and becoming an organizer on campus).  He had the opportunity to get a master’s degree in Social Policy at Harvard, and took it.  Instead of leaving his community behind, he returned to it, organizing field campaigns throughout the state for candidates and issues like Schools Not Jails.  This is someone who hasn’t waited around for higher office to make a difference in his community; he’s rolled up his sleeves and dived in.  As a director for the Borego Community Health Foundation, he’s created one of the first diabetes resource center in the desert region and has delivered health services to underserved regions.  As a researcher for the California Institute for Rural Studies, he put together a groundbreaking study on women’s reproductive health issues in Imperial County, where women have little opportunities and resources to manage their own health.  With Promotores, he’s part of a group of community-based leaders devoted to teaching  about health issues and making sure people in the community get the facts about programs at their disposal.  As a schoolteacher he started his school’s first ever Chicano Studies program designed to allow students to learn history from their perspective.  With the Eastern Coachella Valley Social Change Collaborative, he identified farm workers living in the area and trained them to be community leaders themselves.  Believe it or not, he’s only 34.

Eventually, Pérez and like-minded community leaders saw the ability to effect social change through policymaking.  So they founded an affiliation called “Raises,” or Roots, a group of people from the community who got their educations elsewhere and then returned to lead.  They decided to work in campaigns and put up candidates.  The first year, Pérez was voted onto the Coachella Valley School Board.  And Eddie Garcia was elected to city council in Coachella.  Then Garcia was voted mayor, and Steve Hernandez was elected to city council.  It went from 1 to 2 to 3 and this year 5 members running for office and seeking social change.  These are community leaders built from the bottom up, infused with the desire and obligation to give back.  In Garcia’s mayoral election, they signed up 15,000 new voters, and criscrossed the region 5 or 6 times, knocking on doors persistently despite being outspent by 3 to 1.  Garcia took 70% of the vote, and so did Pérez.

Manuel Pérez is not only a perfect fit for this district, providing an opportunity to retake this seat and get us closer to 2/3.  He represents a new generation of Hispanic-Americans who are dedicated to working for change from the bottom up.  He would bring to Sacramento a unique set of skills, as someone who can build coalitions and train a group of leaders far into the future.  There are primary candidates on the Democratic side for this seat who appear to be very nice.  I don’t think anyone combines the résumé and the hope for the future more than Manuel Pérez.

He has an ActBlue page and he is worth your support.

(I should add that if anyone knows of a great legislative candidate they’d like me to profile for the Drive for 2/3, please email me at dday-at-calitics-dot-com.)