John Burton isn’t one to hold his tongue, and if you are on the CDP’s email list, you’ll know that by now.  But that doesn’t make today’s email any less notable, if only for the tone and strength of its message.

What some might call it a “deal” or “compromise” I would call capitulation to the Republicans.

Just as we do not negotiate with international terrorists, we must stand up to the political terrorism of the Republicans in the United States Senate.

At some point, the American people have to know what kind of people these Republicans are. They may never find out if the Republicans can force their view point on the Administration, splitting the Democratic Party.

The Republicans rant against the deficit, but they give billions, approaching trillions, of tax cuts to millionaires and billionaires.

Click here to contact Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Speaker Nancy Pelosi to thank them for speaking out against this issue and having the Democratic Party stand for something.

So, what have we got here? A message calling the Republicans terrorists and President Obama a modern day Neville Chamberlain. Of course, he is far from the only one.  Democracy for America worked with Sen. Bernie Sanders to attack the plan as “reprehensible”, and Sen. Sanders later put out a release attacking Republicans for failing to adopt an Amendment to provide additional breaks for those receiving Social Security.

You got all that? Millions to each of thousands of millionaires and billionaires? Yay! $250 to millions of social security recipients? Too expensive.  It’s amazing how that works, despite the fact that any economist will tell you that the way you get people working is to distribute money to the poorest end of the spectrum, and let the multiplier take its turn.

Look, the plan won’t necessarily hurt the economy in the short term, but it is a huge missed opportunity to help provide additional funds into the economy. We’re wasting it on people who don’t need it (but desperately lobby for it) instead of providing for those who could use it to get from day to day. It is short sighted in the extreme, and it is good to see John Burton, and whomever else joins the chorus, in objecting in these terms.

What am I talking about? Well, let’s start from the fact that John Myers is all over this California politics stuff.  He went through the most recent finance filings and found that the CDP had received $10,000 from Anthem Blue Cross?

Really? John Burton, as chair of the CDP, thought it was cool to solicit and take money from Anthem Blue Cross? One of the groups he was railing against during the waning days of the health care fight?

I was sort of amazed by that and needed to get to the bottom of this.  So, I called up the CDP and said “What you talking about CDP?”

Turns out, the check arrived, unsolicited, from Anthem Blue Cross late in the work day.  The staff, being a bit hesitant about a $10K check from a big health insurer, set the check aside for Chairman Burton’s approval.  However, this being 24-hour reporting days, the staff, in constant reporting mode, wrote it up right away and filed it.

I’ve been told, and have no reason to doubt it, that the check was never cashed, and will not be cashed. It will be returned promptly.

But, this brings up a good question. Should the party return such unsolicited funds? Certainly, we should not be courting these companies, that much should be in no question at all.  But, if they are dropping off checks, couldn’t the party use that money against the insurer?  Spend it sending mail into swing districts to support representatives that will support single payer health care?

Yeah, they wouldn’t send any more checks, but so what? Anthem knew who they were sending the check to, John Burton, who wrote and got passed SB 2, one of the most progressive health care reform packages ever passed in America. Of course, ABC didn’t like that, and spent heavily to repeal the measure. (Correction: Anthem Blue Cross didn’t actually get involved in SB 2, but have been involved on the wrong side in pretty much every other health care fight in California)

What say you, Calitics folks? Would you have cashed that check?

(There’s an Act Blue page soliciting funds to take a poll on the Lakoff Initiative)

You may have seen me live-tweeting the events last night at SEIU Local 721 in LA, where Professor George Lakoff and the folks behind CA Majority Rule met with around 200 activists, union members, elected officials, legislative candidates, representatives from Speaker Bass’ office, and more, to talk about the just-released proposed November 2010 initiative on majority rule.  If you read through both the live tweets and Dante Atkins’ notes on the meeting, I think you get a picture of a potential split inside the California Democratic Party, one that could have major implications for all elections next year.

It should be noted that CDP Vice-Chair Eric Bauman was there to offer support.  He gave a typical stump speech and said very plainly that “the reason you’re here tonight is the solution” to the problems that grip the state, problems he laid out very carefully and completely.  He was honest in saying that any Democrat who opposes this kind of measure will be told that “vertebra are available for installation… I think the chiropractor’s lobby can help us with that.”  He made clear that we don’t have a spending problem, “we have a common sense problem,” and he pushed everyone in the room to work toward a real solution.

But Professor Lakoff’s speech seemed to capture the dynamic between the grassroots and the establishment much better.  Lakoff opened by talking about the origins of the initiative that he filed yesterday:

I got into this last spring when Lonnie Hancock invited me to speak to a group of State Senators.  And I said, what’s the problem, you’re the majority!  And they said they don’t have any power.  And they explained the whole 2/3rds rule, and how the leadership has to work with them because we want to lose as little as possible.

And I asked, why aren’t you in every assembly district explaining this problem?  It’s about schools, healthcare, everything, and there’s no answer.  I went back and said that there’s something really wrong.  Its name is democracy […] Which is more Democratic?  Majority rule, or minority rule?  You knew the answer from the 3rd grade on.  Even Republicans know the answer but they don’t like to.  We know there will be a blowback if we try to change things, but the hardest blowback is coming from our side.  The reason that Loni Hancock invited me was that there was a  poll done by a progressive organization, and it asked the wrong question.

This is my business.  Studying language and the framing behind language.  If someone presented you with the poll question: would you rather have more taxes and higher services, or fewer taxes and less services.  Obviously, it went with the latter.  And the legislature concluded that they shouldn’t put anything about taxes on the 2010 ballot.  Why do they think that?  Because they think that polls are objective, and that language just floats out there.  They’re wrong.  Language is not neutral.  There’s a truth here that that language hides.  It’s the truth that we don’t have Democracy in this state.  We have minority rule.

In response, because nobody else would do so, Lakoff’s initiative reads: “All Legislative actions on revenue and budget must be determined by majority vote.”  It’s tweetable and it’s fairly simple to understand.  It’s framed as a democratic action to return the state to democratic rule.  And it appeals very much to those interested in preserving democracy.

Which is the consensus opinion inside the Democratic Party.  We know this because, back in July, the state party passed a resolution calling for majority rule for budget and revenue.  And it didn’t pass with contentious debate – it passed unanimously.  One of the very few people to speak out against it was the Party Chair, John Burton.  But the rank and file supported it utterly.

It was something of a reversal for Burton, who when he was trying to get the votes of those rank and file supported a majority vote position.  Now he’s seen some polls and decided to take half a bite out of the apple.  Lakoff described his exceedingly short meeting with Burton last night.

Burton wouldn’t talk to me for more than a minute.  He just said that he saw the polls, and it said 55% on budget and nothing on taxes.  How many of you were at the state convention?  You voted on a resolution about this.  How did that resolution come before you?  The resolutions committee.  And that was the point.  We got the resolutions committee to do it and got a standing ovation.  The rank and file Democrats know it’s the right thing to do and they have to tell their leaders.  So how do you change this?  You have to have a poll, but you have to have pressure.  The major donors have to call Burton and say, if you want any money from me, you get behind this.  And he has to hear that from donor after donor and organization after organization.  We have to win in our own party first.  I think John Burton is a good person, same with Bass and Steinberg.  It’s the good people that we have to win over first.

Later, a woman from AFSCME asserted that Willie Pelote was willing to give $1 million dollars to a majority vote campaign until Burton called him and told him to forget it.

You can argue about what the most effective approach is to deal with California’s budget dysfunction.  We’ve been doing that all week.  You could say that leaders must prepare the ground by tying things Californians want to revenue, and tell the story of Republicans thwarting the popular will.  You can say that we need to throw out the Constitution and move straight to a convention.  But what becomes incredibly clear is that there is a groundswell of support inside the party for a simple move to restore democracy to the state, and if the establishment in Sacramento rejects that, in particular John Burton, the subsequent outrage will have a major impact on grassroots support for all Democratic candidates next year.  There’s just no question about this.  The grassroots already feels disrespected and abused by the leadership.  They got Hillary Crosby into a statewide officer position based on just this kind of frustration.  They feel that one of the richest economies in the world is run like a third-world country, and they know that they will never change that when procedural rules force Democrats into a defensive crouch, where they see their role as losing as little as possible.  This split will grow and branch out into statewide officer races, legislative races, etc.  The grassroots workhorses won’t be very inclined to work so hard for a Party that disrespects them and fails to act in their stated interests.  Not to mention the fact that everyone knows that, while we wait another Friedman Unit until the electorate figures out the problem on their own, people will suffer from budget cuts, people will go bankrupt, and people will die.

The CA Majority Rule team has a multi-pronged strategy.  One, they are raising money for this poll, to try and prove that a properly framed set of questions will elicit the desired results.  Two, they will put Speaker’s Bureaus together in every district in California with people who can talk about majority rule and restoring democracy, complete with real-world examples of the fruit of the state’s dysfunction.  Three, they will seek to pass endorsements of the one-line majority rule initiative in every Democratic club and county committee in California.  There’s an executive board meeting coming up in November where this will probably come to a crescendo, too.

The real story of the Lakoff initiative is a story about rank and file Democrats wanting their leaders to follow their will.  You can argue about tactics or strategy or approach, but that’s what it boils down to.  And the party leadership had better take heed.

X-posted at Progressive Sundae

The special election to replace Ellen Tauscher in CA-10 is taking an ugly turn. The CDP has announced that its endorsement caucus will take place on August 1, and I’m already having flashbacks to Migden-Leno and the 2008 CDP convention.

You see, even though major flaws in the endorsement process were exposed over a year ago, nothing has changed; nor is there, at least to date, any apparent desire on the part of the CDP to address a situation where powerful outsiders are invited to skew the outcome of endorsements in local races.

I’ll do my best to explain it all on the flip…

First a brief lesson in how the endorsement process works in a special election. The chair of the party picks a caucus date and location, and all the members of the California DSCC (Democratic State Central Committee) who live within the district meet and cast their votes. In order to win the endorsement of the CDP, a candidate must receive 60% of the votes cast by these local party members.

So what is the DSCC and how do you become a member of it? Well, statewide, the DSCC is comprised of about 2800 people. Approximately one-third of them are elected by County Central Committees every two years; approximately one-third of them are elected through the ADEMs every two years; approximately one-third of them are appointed by elected officials (or nominees) and serve at their pleasure.

So the Central Committee and AD delegates serve for fixed two-year terms, but the people appointed by the electeds can be changed purely at the whim of their elected. And, as it turns out, there is no requirement in the CDP bylaws that the electeds select their appointees from within the district they represent.

So now that the endorsement caucus has been set for August 1, we can start to examine who will be showing up to vote that day. There will be members elected to the DSCC through the Central Committees of Alameda, Contra Costa, Sacramento, and Solano Counties — but only the ones who physically reside in CA-10. So, for instance, if you’re a DSCC member elected by the Solano Central Committee and you live in Fairfield (CA-10), you can attend the caucus; but if you’re a DSCC member elected by the Solano Central Committee and you live in Vacaville (CA-07), no dice. Same thing goes for the AD delegates. But it’s an entirely different story for the appointees of the electeds.

At least in theory, every Democratic state officer, Senator, Congressmember, State Senator, and Assemblymember in the entire state could dismiss their current appointees and replace them with people who live within CA-10 and are therefore qualified to vote in the caucus. And that’s a lot of appointees. The CDP Bylaws (PDF, Art. II, Sect. 2, beginning on P. 2) spell out how the appointees are allotted:

• State Officers — 6 delegates each
• US Senators — 6 delegates each
• US Congressmembers — 5 delegates each
• State Senators — 6 delegates each
• State Assemblymembers — 5 delegates each

(And those nominees who ran for the offices listed above but did not win their election are allowed to appoint ½ the number of delegates as their elected counterparts — either 3 or 2, depending on the office).

So what’s happening in CA-10 right now? Well, reports have surfaced that the campaigns are pulling out all the stops to get electeds to replace their appointees with CA-10 residents.

So, several of the CD10 Democratic candidates’ campaign teams have in the past couple of weeks lobbied elected officials from up and down the state and asked them to appoint as their delegates folks who live in the 10th District and support their respective candidates.

As a result, the number of delegates in the 10th District has expanded to as many as 300, sources say. Reports put state Sen. Mark DeSaulnier in the delegate count lead over Lt. Governor John Garamendi and Assemblywoman Joan Buchanan.

Well, that makes sense. A cursory look at the endorsements listed on the major candidates’ websites shows the following:

• Joan Buchanan:  Not listing her endorsements at this time.
• John Garamendi:  Five Congressmembers and one Assemblymember, for a total of 30 potential appointees.
• Mark DeSaulnier:  One state officer, four Congressmembers, eleven State Senators, and eight Assemblymembers, for a total of 142 potential appointees.

Now, we currently have no way of determining whether the electeds who have endorsed are backing up their endorsements by appointing CA-10 residents (or, for that matter, whether electeds who have not formally endorsed are doing likewise). But just speculating, based on the raw numbers, it would look like Mark DeSaulnier is going to be the big winner of this sweepstakes. After all, he has a lot of friends from having served recently in both the Assembly and the Senate, and he has a major Congressional cheerleader in Rep. George Miller.

Indeed, if that 300 number is accurate, there’s already more stacking taking place than occurred even in the Migden-Leno conflagration of 2008. It’s exactly this kind of raw power play that turns loyal local Democrats who have been plugging away on behalf of their candidate into cynics who end up walking away from Democratic politics. And I’m saying this as someone who definitely leans toward supporting the beneficiary of this cronyism.

Here’s the thing. Whether they find the practice acceptable or repugnant, all campaigns are going to play the hand they’re dealt. And when the CDP bylaws offer candidates the opportunity to exploit the delegate selection process, they have to take it; frankly, they can do no less.

But, you know what? It doesn’t have to be that way. We now have a CDP chair who campaigned on the issue of reform. John Burton has been giving a lot of lip service to “grassroots activists”; yet here is a perfect example where the local stakeholders are being pushed aside by the electeds who are stacking the deck against them. If Burton really intends to walk the talk, he might want to start by taking action to amend the bylaws so that electeds are required to appoint their delegates from within their district.

It may be too late for CA-10, but this kind of rigged endorsement process should never be allowed to happen again.