You can almost set your watch by it.  The state budget picture is a mess, Democrats ask for a balanced solution, Republicans hold their ground and say no, Democrats don’t have the vote so they let it go.  It happens practically every single year, and it’s happening again, according to CapAlert:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg said separately Thursday that they are optimistic a budget deal can be struck within several days.

The tone of their comments marked a stark contrast to Capitol fighting over the last few weeks between Democrats and Republicans over bridging the state’s $26.3 billion budget gap.

Steinberg also said Democrats had given up any attempt to increase taxes on tobacco or establish an oil severance tax […]

The Senate president said that Democrats no longer are pushing for a 9.9 percent tax on oil extraction or for hiking the state’s tobacco tax by $1.50 per pack.

“We would like to see an increase in the tobacco tax and the oil severance tax as a solution, but in this chapter that’s not realistic and it’s not what we’re holding out for,” Steinberg said.

It’s never going to be realistic in ANY CHAPTER.  Republicans know exactly how to play this game.  Their votes are needed for tax increases, so if they hang together they cannot lose.  The Democrats haven’t figured out how to shame the Yacht Party or make them pay for their votes, giving them no reason to do anything but hijack the process.  You’ll notice that as a result of this horrific experiment in governance, California is operating worse than practically every other state in the union.  

We’ve seen this kind of “it’s almost over” trial balloon on many occasions, so I wouldn’t put on the party hats just yet.  But somehow at the end of this process, somebody will step up to a microphone and claim how reaching agreement is a sign of success.  No.  It’s a sign of failure.  A failure to responsibly manage the state’s finances, reflected by the worst economy in 70 years.  The only lesson that can be learned from this process is that it’s fundamentally broken.

P.S. You’ll be thrilled to know that Schwarzenegger still sleeps well at night.

Schwarzenegger and I then repaired to a tent that he had put up in a courtyard next to his office, which allows him to smoke cigars legally at work (no smoking is allowed inside the Capitol). The tent is about 15 square feet, carpeted with artificial turf and outfitted with stylish furniture, an iPod, a video-conferencing terminal, trays of almonds, a chess table, a refrigerator and a large photo of the governor. Schwarzenegger reclined deeply in his chair, lighted an eight-inch cigar and declared himself “perfectly fine,” despite the fiscal debacle and personal heartsickness all around him. “Someone else might walk out of here every day depressed, but I don’t walk out of here depressed,” Schwarzenegger said. Whatever happens, “I will sit down in my Jacuzzi tonight,” he said. “I’m going to lay back with a stogie.”

This is the guy who dares to chide others for not doing their job.

So the Senate Republicans voted en masse against $11 billion in cuts as part of the budget proposal put forward by the Democrats today.  Lou Correa and Leland Yee voted no as well, and the final vote was 22-16.  Technically, I believe the bill could go to the Assembly, and after passage to the Governor, but Arnold has vowed a veto, so that’s probably out.  Meanwhile, California will start to use the reserve fund to pay bills for the next week or so, and failing a solution after that, will resort to IOUs, which basically was the deal back in February as well.  Yes, the Democratic proposal has its share of gimmickry, but no more than the Governor’s own plan, and considering the Yacht Party refuses to write a plan, ALL OF THEIRS is gimmickry, as is their entire ideology.  But the Yacht Party smells blood in the water, the Democrats have pulled their tax proposals off the table, and the future is incredibly uncertain.  

I cannot disagree with Greg Lucas’ analysis.

Examining the Senate’s budgetary actions of June 24 from a political rather than a policy perspective, the majority party Democrats may not have achieved their objectives […]

Judging from the remarks of Senate President Pro Tempore Darrell Steinberg, a Sacramento Democrat, the intent of the exercise was to illustrate that Democrats are unwilling to cut as deeply into social programs as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and to portray Republican lawmakers as obstructionist or hypocritical or both for not backing the cuts embraced by Democrats.

“Democrats are asking Republicans to vote for billions of dollars in cuts and apparently your answer today is ‘no,’ Steinberg said. “Why won’t you cut? Why won’t you cut?” […]

In a purely political sense, the “bad” vote is the one cast by Democrats, ostensibly champions of public education, who – if the February budget they backed is included – have chosen to reduce state support of schools by more than $12 billion over a two-year period.

Republicans can portray their “no” vote as a refusal to cut nearly $5 billion more from public schools.

Perhaps a more effective illustration of support for what Democrats call the safety net would be to bring several of the GOP governor’s more draconian proposals to a vote.

It seems unlikely Schwarzenegger’s call to eliminate California’s welfare program would garner the votes necessary for passage. Nor would the governor’s proposal to end state grants to lower-income high school students to help them attend college.

After rejecting those and possibly other gubernatorial proposals then a vote on the more modest – more humane – measure with $11 billion in cuts might more satisfactorily frame the issue.

I would argue that making these “symbolic” votes doesn’t do a ton of good unless you’re willing to use them in the context of the 2010 campaign (and I don’t remember votes coming into play in key districts in 2008) or in a coordinated and widespread media campaign immediately.  To the latter point, we don’t have any such media in California.  It’s a good argument in search of a broadcaster, and that goes for Lucas’ alternative solution.

The real problem is that Democrats don’t appear to have an endgame strategy, and haven’t for years.  The words “two-thirds majority” hasn’t exited anyone’s lips in quite a while.  This is a process problem, and only a process solution will suffice, and teachable moments like these have been wasted for 30 years.  

In the upside-down world of the California budget mess, the Senate President Pro Tem is now criticizing Republicans for their refusal to vote for cuts.

Senate Leader Darrell Steinberg wants to put Republicans on record today on two political questions: whether they can accept $11.4 billion in cuts that Democrats are proposing, and whether they will vote on $2 billion in new taxes.

On taxes, Steinberg conceded he is unlikely to win a single Republican vote when the Senate takes up the Democrats’ $23.3 billion deficit reduction plan. But that, he said, shouldn’t stop them from supporting his package of cuts, which will be voted on separately.

“If they’re going to stand on the argument that cuts are not deep enough and thereby not vote for $11 billion in cuts, then we have some issues,” Steinberg said at a news briefing next to his Capitol office. “It’s interesting. I’m getting a sense that Republicans are getting shy about voting for cuts. That would be an odd headline: Democrats urging Republicans to vote for cuts.”

Actually, it’s not an odd headline.  It’s the inevitable consequence of a broken political system where you need a simple majority to make cuts and a 2/3 majority to raise taxes.  Period.  

In this case, Steinberg can pass the whole budget, save $2 billion in oil and cigarette taxes, by majority vote, because this is not a budget enactment, but a revision.  If he doesn’t muster 2/3 for the cuts, however, the revision will be delayed 90 days, reducing the effectiveness of the cuts by roughly 1/4, and forcing additional solutions to fill the deficit later.  Even when mostly cuts are on the table, Republicans are using the leverage of undemocratic supermajorities to force more cuts.

Here’s Zed Hollingsworth playing dumb that all he wants is a comprehensive solution.

“We’re willing to vote for the cuts that provide for a complete solution,” said Republican leader Dennis Hollingsworth, R-Temecula. “We’re not willing to vote for a partial solution that has us coming back in the spring having to find more revenues when another calamity hits. We’re not interested in political gamesmanship.”

No, the Yacht Party would NEVER be interested in political gamesmanship, perish the thought.  They’d never want to try to send the state into bankruptcy to make a political point or anything.  By the way, Zed, news flash: you’ll be back in the spring.  The projections from the Legislative Analyst have consistently fallen short of reality, and no matter how big a budget reserve gets baked into this new budget, you can bet dollars to donuts it won’t be enough, especially considering the potentially accelerated Depression that additional cuts to the social services net will force.  The Anderson Forecast estimates 64,000 government jobs lost from this round of budget cuts.  Even in Dan Walters’ world, that’s a significant chunk.

My problem with the Democrats on this is mainly their insistence on working within a broken system.  They miss every opportunity to put the failed governmental structure on trial.  Something as absurd as Republicans voting against program cuts – to ensure MORE program cuts – defies belief without an explanation of how it’s a symbol for a bad process that must be fixed.  The goal of this budget, which was never going to be pretty regardless of the May 19 election, should have been to heighten that reality.  

Here’s an article showing kind of a silly trumped-up sanctimony on behalf of the Yacht Party.

California voters said no, but Democratic lawmakers are pushing to do it anyhow.

The issue involves billions of dollars and a ballot measure so important to schools that the California Teachers Association spent more than $7 million in a failed attempt to pass Proposition 1B.

One month after the initiative died, Democrats are proposing to pay schools the same $7.9 billion that was the heart of the measure and to begin payments the same year, 2011-2012.

The funding commitment is part of a massive budget-balancing plan crafted by a joint legislative conference committee and scheduled to be voted upon this week by the Senate and Assembly.

Sen. Mimi Walters, R-Laguna Niguel, said the proposal to commit $7.9 billion to schools directly contradicts the people’s will.

“The voters have spoken and we need to listen,” Walters said. “Unfortunately, the majority party in Sacramento isn’t listening.”

Would that the Republicans always listen precisely to what the voters want – say, when they put 63% majorities into both houses of the Leigslature, for example.  The Republican Governor has asked for a $4.5 billion reserve at a time of economic crisis, when voters “rejected” a rainy-day fund in Prop. 1A.  You can argue the economics of a reserve fund that large on the basis that the economy still has some rough patches, but you can just as easily argue that the Governor is somehow upending the voter’s will.

The SacBee does offer the contextual reality of the Democrats’ effort here.  Before the May 19 special election, the California Federation of Teachers and associated groups sued the state for that $7.9 billion, which they feel is owed to them.  The dispute comes over how mandatory Prop. 98 funding gets calculated, and the CFT feels they have a solid argument that they actually deserved more money under the law than the state provided.  You can say that you don’t like mandates in funding generally, but the courts will eventually decide this dispute regardless of what the legislature does.  And Democrats can see the possibility – some would say probability – of CFT being able to win that lawsuit and receive payment immediately, rather than two years out (although “immediately” would probably not happen for a year or so, until the case worked its way through the courts).

Prop. 1B was essentially an attempted out-of-court settlement.  That having failed, the participants are going to court.  Incidentally, every subsequent budget cut adds to the money owed to schools under Prop. 98, which has ballooned to around $11 billion.  So the options are: either set up a future payment schedule, hope the courts rule in a way that would break with precedent, or dismantle Prop. 98 (which wouldn’t get the state off the hook for funds owed).  So when Mimi Walters argues that “the people have spoken,” she’s saying that they’ve spoken on cutting school funding to dead-last in the nation, all the while not answering the still-thorny problem of a current lawsuit.

Someone should tell her constituents that.

In order to save you, my dear Calitics readers, the trouble of receiving the Senate Republican Caucus Emails, I choose to receive them. Generally, they are just recaps of the day’s news. But from time to time they bring out a “Briefing Report.”  And ooooh, just like Arnold, they are pissed about anything that doesn’t have a 2/3 vote on it.

The Constitution stipulates that all political power is inherent in the people and they have the right to alter or reform government for the good of the public. If trying to force taxes on the people doesn’t warrant reform, what will? Did someone just say “California Tea Party”?

Damn that will of the people who keep electing Democrats who won’t succumb to turning the state into a third world country.

Essentially through the entirety of the email, they use a frame of “California’s framers”. The whole concept of framers in the context of California is more than a bit ridiculous.  The whole constitution has been marked up more than a high school essay. At this point there is no unifying principle to the document, and there aren’t any people you can point to as having a clear understanding of the meaning of the document.

For example, they point to Article 4, section 12d. That was amended by Prop 13, and further amended since that time.  Yet, that doesn’t stop them from arguing that somehow California’s framers are rolling over in their graves:

When our state founding fathers drafted the California Constitution, they envisioned a document that would achieve balance between the people’s freedom and rights, and government’s role in protecting those rights. After the Preamble and Article I’s declaration of the people’s rights, Article II opens by stipulating that:

“All political power is inherent in the people. Government is instituted for their protection, security, and benefit, and they have the right to alter or reform it when the public good may require.”

To that end, the Constitution deliberately limits government’s ability to spend the people’s money and increase the people’s taxes.

Just to be clear, many of the framers of Sec 12d are not only still alive, but they are still active in state politics. This isn’t some grand constitutional principle, this is current day politics.  Current day politics that is broken and nearly devoid of principle.

The Senate Republican Caucus, much like the tea party extremists who displayed images of Hitler/Obama mashups, give a vague odor of rebellion with words like “did anybody say tea party?” They continue to reject the will of a fairly sizeable majority of the state. A majority of the state that desires a functioning state government. And then they have the temerity to decry the building of a working coalition to move something, anything through the state?

The best part of all this? They go after state constitutional proposals sitting in the Senate, that they know for damn sure will never go anywhere. Just to place them on the ballot, the Legislature needs to get 2/3 agreement.  It is  sheer madness to not allow the majority place an amendment on the ballot, when you can just do it for a million bucks outside the local safeway or wal-mart. And what are these crrrraaaazzzzy proposals? Oh, well, a restoration of majority rule (SCA 5, Hancock and SCA 9, Ducheny), a parcel tax system approved in an education district requiring a “mere” 55 approval (SCA 6 – Simitian), and local taxation at 55% supermajority (SCA 12-Kehoe).  Man, those are really crazy, watch out, you just might find that the people can decide for themselves, rather than depending on an isolated minority to agree to something.

The initiative system is broken down, our constitution has no guiding principles because it is like a crowd sourced project gone awry. We need to Repair California.

AB 286, authored by Assembly member Salas, is a fairly simple renewal of a program that already exists. Under current law, counties are allowed to decide whether they want to impose a $1 for personal/$2 for commercial vehicles in order to fund an anti-car theft program.

This isn’t some grand new program, it is simply a reauthorization of an existing program, but no, that dollar is very meaningful!

In a sign of bigger budget clashes to come, legislation to extend the life of a local $1 per year car registration fee to combat auto theft ran into fierce opposition from Republicans Wednesday. … The 45-25 vote sends the measure to the Senate.

*  *  *

But Republicans called the fee an “end run” around laws that require voter support for new taxes. They said public safety programs should get first call on budgets and not have to rely on additional fees. …

Assemblyman Kevin Jeffries, R-Lake Elsinore, said if the state had its priorities in order “we wouldn’t be arguing about .. a dollar.” (SD U-T 6/4/09)

My first point would be that this clearly not a NEW fee. It is an old fee. How exactly is renewing an already existing fee imposing “a new tax.” The sheer logic gap is mind boggling.

The Republicans are now so single minded that they are arguing over a single dollar fee for a public safety program Republicans would ordinarily support. It is a program with strong accountability measures that has shown to be successful, but the Republicans are dragging it into a broader fight about the budget system.

Now, I won’t argue that we shouldn’t be funding the government this way, but when it comes down to it, there are no other options. Prop 13 and the supermajority rules have brought us to this point. There is no more room to cut, and now we are left playing shell games.  And even after the Republicans have succeeded in making governing California impossible, they won’t even play by their own rules.

But this is where logical extremes take you…

(crossposted from Orange County Progressive for those who wonder what the Yacht Party members do when they’re not just voting “NO”)

Oh my gawd!

Did you know that when the St. Margaret’s Episcopal School,the private school that State Senator Mimi Walters daughters attend, has a big fund-raiser at a tony restaurant, where the Governor comes, and there’s one of those 18% mandatory service charges instead of being able to figure out your own tip, did you know that the state charges you tax on the tip?

How unfair is that?

Your friendly yacht party representative knows we need to have a law to fix this.

You can’t make this shit up. There’s really a bill Mimi Walters introduced – SB 107 to eliminat taxes on mandatory service charges charged to non-profits for food and beverages.

Can you believe that a legislative initiative as important as this was “Placed on  REV. & TAX. suspense file”?

And that’s not the only huge problem in the tax code that Mimi’s trying to fix. Did you know that when you buy new car, and you have a trade-in, you pay taxes on the entire cost of the new car.

Mimi has two bills to revive our moribund economy by giving you a break on the tax on your trade-in, and giving you an exemption on the car tax for the first year.

You just know you were going to head on down to Fletcher Jones, but you didn’t want to pay that tax on your trade-in or pay that new higher Vehicle License Fee.

Your modern Yacht Party at work. A Roadmap to Recovery, one tax cut at a time.

The Yacht Party’s public relations staff scored a coup by getting one of their press releases into print about those mean, nasty legislators spending all our tax dollars.  Now, it turns out that some of the cost-cutting measures put forward by these Republicans have a bit of merit.  But it’s all a matter of scale.  These measures would produce savings in the millions of dollars, which is a lot to the individual blogger who really welcomes your donations (hint, hint), but not so much to a nation-state of 38 million.  However, missing from the litany in this article is any measure that would actually put a dent in the budget crisis, like a broader-based sales tax that captures what people consume.  AB178, which was also squashed this week, could have added anything from $2 billion-$5 billion to the General Fund.  In other words, it would take more than 1,000 bills of the likes of Jeff Denham’s AB44, to abolish the Integrated Waste Management Board, to have the impact of Nancy Skinner’s AB178.  But million and billion sound alike, so the Waste Management Board bill gets in the paper, while the squashing of the bill that would raise almost as much as Prop. 1C all by itself gets… nothing.

More of the essentially conservative slant of the media.

Riffing off of Brian’s post referencing the horror show of a Field Poll, where Californians polled apparently think we can balance the budget through spending cuts but don’t want to cut anything (a sort-of companion PPIC poll basically shows the same thing, with respect to nobody wanting education cuts but nobody wanting to pay for increases), this should be a very familiar outlook to people.  It’s at the heart of the two Santa Claus theory, proposed by Jude Wanniski, a Republican economist, during the time of Ronald Reagan.  

By 1974, Jude Wanniski had had enough. The Democrats got to play Santa Claus when they passed out Social Security and Unemployment checks – both programs of the New Deal – as well as when their “big government” projects like roads, bridges, and highways were built giving a healthy union paycheck to construction workers. They kept raising taxes on businesses and rich people to pay for things, which didn’t seem to have much effect at all on working people (wages were steadily going up, in fact), and that made them seem like a party of Robin Hoods, taking from the rich to fund programs for the poor and the working class. Americans loved it. And every time Republicans railed against these programs, they lost elections […]

Wanniski decided to turn the classical world of economics – which had operated on this simple demand-driven equation for seven thousand years – on its head. In 1974 he invented a new phrase – “supply side economics” – and suggested that the reason economies grew wasn’t because people had money and wanted to buy things with it but, instead, because things were available for sale, thus tantalizing people to part with their money. The more things there were, the faster the economy would grow.

At the same time, Arthur Laffer was taking that equation a step further. Not only was supply-side a rational concept, Laffer suggested, but as taxes went down, revenue to the government would go up!

Neither concept made any sense – and time has proven both to be colossal idiocies – but together they offered the Republican Party a way out of the wilderness […]

Democrats, (Wanniski) said, had been able to be “Santa Clauses” by giving people things from the largesse of the federal government. Republicans could do that, too – spending could actually increase. Plus, Republicans could be double Santa Clauses by cutting people’s taxes! For working people it would only be a small token – a few hundred dollars a year on average – but would be heavily marketed. And for the rich it would amount to hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts. The rich, in turn, would use that money to import or build more stuff to market, thus increasing supply and stimulating the economy. And that growth in the economy would mean that the people still paying taxes would pay more because they were earning more.

There was no way, Wanniski said, that the Democrats could ever win again. They’d have to be anti-Santas by raising taxes, or anti-Santas by cutting spending. Either one would lose them elections.

In the intervening 35 years, we have had no progressive leader in California, no Democratic leader, challenge that ridiculous theory in any meaningful way.  Instead, over and over again, Democrats must lead the charge killing off the two Santa Clauses, filling budget deficits by raising taxes or cutting spending, frequently the latter.  And while other factors have contributed to Democratic dominance in recent years, the ideological theories of Santa Claus conservatism remain.  And Democrats and Republicans alike have ingrained them into their lizard brains, either by believing in them, or believing that everyone else believes in them and there’s no way to change that.

In truth, public opinion, particularly in such a low-information state like California, is quite malleable.  But nobody has bothered to discredit the Two Santa Claus theory, the idea that we can have all the services we need and the lowest taxes possible.  Of course, the insidious dynamic of the two-thirds rule, putting Democrats both nominally in power but subject to a conservative veto, has made a Democratic message impossible, so constrained it is by the straitjacket of an ungovernable system.

Now, the out for the believers in two Santa Clauses is that government can just do more with the money they have, through better efficiency.  Nobody would argue that government is perfectly efficient – I don’t see anyone leaping to defend spending $580,000 on unused office space – but the savings from that efficiency exist on the margins, and would do little to really impact our woefully low per capita state spending on areas like K-12 education.  So we get bullshitty ideas like cutting lawmaker pay (the Governor jumped all over that one), or trashing the state’s Waste Management Board, which has become a waystation for termed-out legislators to pull in a nice salary.  These “efficiency” maneuvers would do absolutely nothing relative to the budget deficit.  And the areas that would make a dent, like a broader-based sales tax that catches everything we consume, if off-limits because of special interest lobbying:

The declining “yield” of the state’s sales tax is one cause of California’s ongoing budget deficits. Since 1960, the revenue raised by each one percent state sales tax rate has fallen by about one-third. The reasons for the decline are two-fold. First, consumers now spend a larger share of their incomes on services, which are largely untaxed, rather than goods, which are subject to the state’s sales tax. The second reason is the rise of internet sales, including purchases from out-of-state retailers, that don’t collect the tax on sales made to California consumers. Estimates suggest that California loses $2 billion to $5 billion per year from untaxed internet sales – enough to make a significant and lasting dent in the state’s chronic budget woes.

In light of this fact, one might think that a bill that attempts to narrow a loophole that provides preferential treatment for businesses located entirely outside of California would be a “no brainer.” Unfortunately, this appears not to be the case. Assemblymember Nancy Skinner’s AB 178 is similar to a recently enacted New York law, would require businesses such as Amazon.com that enter into “affiliate” relationships with California-based entities to collect California sales tax.

At a time when California faces significant budget shortfalls and California retailers face declining sales, you’d think a bill that makes it possible for the state to actually collect taxes that are legally owed and that limits an incentive for Californians to buy from businesses that don’t employ a single Californian would be greeted with open arms. Unfortunately, opposition from tech industry lobbyists has left the measure’s future in question.

Ultimately, we have a serious problem.  Our citizens get almost no public policy information from media, our state capitol is too often run by corporate interests, our Democratic leadership cowers from advocacy to disabuse citizens of false notions, and our Yacht Party is completely crazy.  This is not insurmountable but requires leadership.  We elected a President by 61% of the vote in California who was derided as a socialist.  Attitudes can be changed.  But someone has to stand up and speak.

In a last-ditch and ultimately futile attempt to get the Republicans to support the May 19 ballot measures, Yacht Party leader in the Assembly Mike Villines played the majority vote card.

One fear of GOP lawmakers surrounding the May 19 special election is that should the ballot measures fail, Democrats and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger could go around them and simply swap certain taxes for fees and raise revenues without their votes […]

“I know it’s counterintuitive, but by coming to the table and negotiating, we saved the two-thirds protection,” Villines said as the California Republican Party opposed the measures. “Mark my word, I believe that if these initiatives don’t go through, you will see a majority-vote budget, you will see it signed and you will see the defense of taxpayers in this state disappear.”

Mike, you say that like majority rule is a bad thing.

Unfortunately I don’t share the optimism of Asm. Villines about the backbone of the Democratic Party to go ahead and fill the budget gap with a work-around fee increase.  I had the opportunity to share the stage with a couple members of the legislature this weekend to debate the special election, and in particular, Senate Majority Leader Dean Florez seemed especially pessimistic on the majority vote option.  He basically said that the lawyers advising the legislature questions the legality of the effort and that if the ballot measures fail, “we will have a cuts-only budget.”  He even went so far as to identify particular cuts that have already been discussed, all affecting the usual suspects – the elderly, the blind, the IHSS patients, kids without health care, CalWorks members, etc.  So that’s the May 20th strategy that the legislature is teeing up.

Now, maybe it’s easier to ramp up the fear by playing up this disaster scenario in the event of the failure of the ballot measures.  But I definitely expressed disappointment that the Majority Leader was foreclosing on an option which the nonpartisan Legislative Counsel found perfectly legal.  I see no need to shut down creative solutions to the budget problem, especially when they can offer a glimpse into how a working government can function in a post-two-thirds environment.  Even moderates and conservatives understand that the Yacht Party has hijacked the state and irresponsibly used their chokehold on legislative rules to force failed solutions and drive California into a fiscal ditch.  The point is that this is coming, or at least it ought to be, whether by a work-around or ballot initiative, and we can end this hostage situation that Republicans have forced upon us for the last thirty years.  To their credit, everyone in the legislature that I’ve talked to wants to move forward on repealing two-thirds.

Sen. Florez and I had a lot else to discuss in our debate (including his admission that “if you want to vote No on 1F, go ahead,” which was a bit off the reservation), including the continued debate over the state spending cap, Prop. 1A (or a spending constraint, if you prefer, but certainly not anything like the inoffensive tweak that supporters make it out to be).  In the end, the West Los Angeles Democratic Club took no position on anything but No on 1E, and PDA, where I also spoke this weekend, voted NO on all the ballot measures.