As anyone who hasn’t been living under a rock in this state probably knows by now, California politics are at an unsustainable impasse.  Californians support extending taxes to balance the budget, and in particular support making the ultra-wealthy pay their fair share.  On the other hand, when phrased generally, Californians prefer budget cuts to tax increases, but oppose any specific cuts to the budget that would make the slightest impact on the state’s fiscal health.  Additionally and more importantly, Californians don’t support a repeal of Proposition 13, which creates the need for a 2/3 supermajority in both chambers of the Legislature to actually raise taxes.

The California Republican Party, meanwhile, has just over the 1/3 in the Legislature to not only prevent revenue increases, but also to stop commonsense efforts by the Governor to place commonsense budgeting that include a mix of cuts and tax extensions on the ballot. Nor does the CRP have any incentive, electoral or otherwise, to compromise even an inch on the issue without a offering ridiculous and ever-growing list of demands in exchange for the hostage. Democrats in both the Executive and Legislative branches, whom Californians voted into office overwhelmingly against the national 2010 tide, have little power but to attempt to minimize the damage caused by unnecessary and devastating cuts.  And even if a combination of redistricting and GOP unpopularity were enough to deliver 2/3 of the Legislature to Democrats in both chambers, it is probable that just enough conservative Democrats afraid of Chamber of Commerce money could be found, to vote against their Party and continue the gridlocked status quo.

The only potential way out of this complicated mess is through an already over-powerful and deeply flawed initiative process.  But with voters unwilling to eliminate supermajority rules on revenue increases, real solutions seem to be few and far between. One potential solution offered by the folks at Calbuzz would be to offer a conditional all-cuts budget, forcing a “yes” vote for awful cuts and a “no” vote to deny them.  This is an interesting idea, but fraught with great risks and potential hurdles.

But another path of lesser resistance may lie open: one that takes the confirmed desires of Californians into account while providing a permanent and sustainable solution to the budget crisis.

The solution would involve keeping the 2/3 requirement for revenue increases on all households falling below a certain prescribed income level, while moving to a simple majority vote on revenues for corporate entities (with possible small business exemptions), and all households with incomes above that level.  The level itself could be open to debate but due to high cost of living in California, should probably fall on the higher end (say, around $250,000 to $300,000 per annum.)  Such an initiative should be free of significant legal challenge, as the California Court of Appeals already ruled the “Millionaire Tax” Proposition 63 to be constitutional, and not a violation of the equal protection rights of the ultra-wealthy.

Californians like the idea of raising taxes on the rich and on corporations, as a way not only to balance the budget but also mitigate the growing income inequality so damaging to the fabric of society.  But they don’t want to see taxes raised on themselves, as they already feel nickel-and-dimed in most aspects of their lives, even as basic cost of living continues to rise.  Further, any politician seeking to implement regressive taxation in a state where the bottom quintiles already pay a greater share of their incomes than the top 1% as is should probably have their head (or heart) examined.  The answer to both California’s budget crisis and to feckless Democrats’ political woes lies neither in regressive taxation nor in continual “compromise” with those who value the well-being of John Galt over those of the sick, the elderly, the destitute and the middle class, but rather in a sustainable economic system in which investments are made in the future with equitable contributions from all levels of society, particularly those who have been most fortunate and demand the most in externalized costs from society to support their lifestyles.

A ballot initiative specifically designed to leverage Californian’s basic economic populist sentiments should have the power not only to be successful at the ballot box, but also to permanently end the legislative gridlock in Sacramento in a way that reflects the actual values of the people of California.

The deadline for filing an initiative that would make the November 2010 ballot is Friday (Just a quick update to that: Friday is a suggested deadline to maximize time for signature gathering) .  The initial measures to repeal the 2/3 ballot initiatives filed by Maurice Read failed at the end of July.  There is currently an initiative to lower the threshold from 2/3 to 3/5 in circulation, but it does not have any backing.

And that’s it.  There is no pending initiative regarding any two-thirds rule, with the institutional support needed to get on the ballot, and the deadline is Friday.

As has been mentioned in a Contra Costa Times article, the political leadership in the CDP appears to be moving away from it.

A split between Democratic activists and the political pros who run the party may be growing over how to approach the issue that has bedeviled the party for years: the two-thirds vote required to pass taxes and budgets in the Legislature.

Most Democrats in the upper echelons of the party apparatus are convinced it’s a fool’s errand to try to persuade voters to hand the majority party unchecked power to raise taxes. Instead, they’re gearing up for a campaign next year to lower the threshold – from two-thirds of both legislative bodies to a simple majority – on budget votes only, a path they believe voters can embrace.

But some grass roots liberals say they’re frustrated with the caution of party leaders and believe, if sold right, voters would hand over both taxing and budgeting powers to the majority party.

“This is a doable thing, but it requires getting Democrats together and deciding to really do it,” said George Lakoff, a UC Berkeley linguistics professor who has become a de facto leader of the cause and is preparing to submit by next week a ballot measure for the November 2010 election that would drop the two-thirds requirement on both taxes and budgets. “Either they want to give the state a future or they can let Republicans continue pushing it into disaster.” […]

But party leaders see him as quixotic, and dismiss his position as misplaced and uninformed.

“People are not ready to pass it,” said John Burton, the Democratic party chairman and a former Senate leader. “He’s got a theory. Good luck to him.”

Mind you, that another guy had a theory before he entered the CDP Chairmanship: John Burton.  At the time he committed himself to repealing the 2/3 majority for the budget and taxes, and listed it as a top priority.  But I don’t even know that the Burton fallback position is being considered; as of now, they have a little over 48 hours to file a 2/3 repeal on the budget.  And of course, this would immediately put half of what a budget is – revenues – off-limits, while taking responsibility for bad budgets that cannot be fixed.

What I have heard now is that, with statewide offices being decided in 2010, party leaders don’t want to put revenue on the ballot and increase GOP turnout against it, threatening their statewide officer candidates.

This is nothing more than a Friedman Unit strategy.  We cannot put such a proposal on the ballot in 2010 because it might hurt candidates, so we move it to the next election.  Which has candidates in it as well, so we have to just hold off past 2012.  But our Governor’s up for re-election/trying to defeat the Republican in 2014, so we have to hold off then, too.  As a result, nothing proceeds.

And it’s worse than that.  We hear constantly that the public is not ready for a conversation about changing the rule, but in the meantime nothing is being done to prepare the ground for that shift in public opinion.  It’s not that we have to give the war a few more months to succeed, as in the Friedman Unit; it’s that we have to give NOTHING more time for voters to, I guess, come up with their own ideas about state government.

The inescapable conclusion you must come to is that everyone in the system actually likes the system as it is. For Democrats, they personally prosper by getting elected and re-elected, and they can always blame the 2/3 rule for whatever failures occur. It’s accountability-free government complete with a scapegoat, and it rocks their world.

We can talk about how Democratic leaders tend to view the electorate as static and unchangeable, rather than the starting point from where opinion can be shaped.  We can talk about how small-bore goals or a major crisis can provide the spark for the change the state so desperately needs.  But this isn’t a failure of imagination.  It’s a general contentment with the status quo.

Which is why change will have to be imposed upon the system from the outside.  The most intriguing initiatives to date are the one pushed by Lenny Goldberg to repeal the $2 billion dollar a year corporate tax breaks, and the proposal for a Constitutional convention (though that has also not gone into circulation by the Bay Area Council, but only through an independent effort from Paul Currier).  This obviously cannot be left to anyone in Sacramento – they will always find a convenient excuse for delay.

People seemed to really engage with this post about a Constitutional convention, so I wanted to follow up with some of my thoughts for what a convention could tackle and what it could look like.  As it happens I attended a town hall meeting about a proposed ConCon a couple weeks ago in Santa Monica, featuring Bob Stern of the Center for Governmental Studies, Jim Wunderman of the Bay Area Council, Steven Hill and Mark Paul of the New America Foundation, Asm. Julia Brownley (AD-41), Santa Monica Mayor Pam O’Connor and LA City Councilman Bill Rosendahl.

At the root, a Constitutional convention must concern itself with restoring confidence in government.  Right now, that’s at an all-time low, especially after budget agreements hashed out in secret that defy the will of the people and an erosion in the public trust in lawmakers to do the right thing in Sacramento.  Government is not responsive, in fact in many cases it cannot Constitutionally be responsive to the popular will.  The institutions have become paralyzed and captive to special interest lobbying.  We have ten lobbyists for every legislator in Sacramento.  And we have turned over the reins to a new branch of government, the ballot, and anything significant must be mandated by a vote of the people.  As Julia Brownley, now in her second term, said, “Government structure is broken and we need to fix it… I didn’t understand until I set foot in the Legislature the paralysis and gridlock that kills the system.”  I think Sen. Mark DeSaulnier, who is carrying Constitutional convention legislation in the Senate, put it well when he said that California remains at the vanguard with anything that can be accomplished on a majority-vote basis.  Anything with a 2/3 threshold, in other words anything fiscal, is a mess. And it needs to be solved.

So how would a convention, the first of its kind since 1879, be structured? (flip)

 Right now, only the Legislature, with a 2/3 vote, can call for one.  But the Bay Area Council and others who have studied this believe they can go to the ballot with two measures – one changing the Constitution to allow the people to call for a convention, and another to call for one.  These can even be accomplished on the same ballot; while some have raised legal objections to this, this is pretty much how a recall election works, with the recall and replacement on the same ballot.  Those who want to maintain the status quo because it works for them may disagree, but the California Supreme Court has clearly shown very wide latitude on votes of the people under the current system.

Other major issues to be hashed out with a convention are the scope and the delegate selection.  Jim Wunderman of the Bay Area Council has said that everything within government should be on the table, which worries some that a Pandora’s box will be open, an opportunity to mess with fundamental rights.  First of all, that’s the case right now, as last November proved.  Second, I do believe there would be eventual problems with any document that nullified rights granted by the federal Constitution (the basis of the current Prop. 8 lawsuit).  What we’re really talking about with a convention is a process to create a more sustainable structure, dealing with electoral issues, governance issues, fiscal/budget issues, and direct democracy issues.  That’s a fair bit of territory, and I don’t see any need to expand beyond that.

Then there’s the thorny issue of delegate selection.  Steven Hill explains in a study of the issue that there are three basic means for selecting delegates: through appointments, through elections, or through a random selection consistent with state demographics.  There are plusses and minuses to all of them, but Hill reasons that the appointment process could wind up looking like patronage, and the election process mired by our useless campaign finance laws.  Both would fall to the whims of the current broken process and could be hijacked by special interests seeking input in the results of a convention.  They would also wind up looking a lot like the Legislature, which doesn’t go far to renewing confidence and trust in government.  So Hill falls on the side of random selection as the “least worst” option.

Pros: Random selection would be the best method for ensuring a representative body; random selection of “average citizens” brings a sense of grassroots legitimacy to the process, which would give the proposals of the constitutional convention credibility with the voters; random selection might be the best process for shielding delegates against special interest influence; random selection has the gloss of being something new and different, never been tried, and therefore may have the greatest potential to capture the imagination of the public and the media.

Cons: Random selection of “average citizens” would not necessarily guarantee sufficient expertise on the part of the delegates. A thorough educational process would be necessary, and it would be important that the educational process for delegates was designed to prevent “capture” by any particular special interest or perspective. The selection process would also need to weed out any delegates who are not are sufficiently committed to participate for many months.

I don’t think capturing the imagination of the media is a good reason to do it, but Hill has cited examples of citizen’s commissions in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and in New York City dealing with the World Trade Center redevelopment, with fairly positive reviews.

I think where you fall along these lines can be best determined by your theories of government.  If you think that the system needs to be gamed for particular outcomes, you probably want an election that would allow the participation of various special interests.  If you believe that good government and progressive government are analogous, that an iron-clad structure itself need not be partisan, but just allow the prevailing philosophy of the majority to have sway over the results, you may be interested in a random selection based on demographics (and, I would add, party ID).  Right now, we have a progressive legislature and a conservative system, which frustrates efforts at accountability.  A small-d democratic system would not only be more fair than the current system of minority rule, and it would not only be more helpful for the voters trying to determine who is responsible for what happens in government, but it would actually be more fiscally responsible.  The Two Santa Claus Theory that dictates we can have robust services and endlessly low taxes forces government to resort to borrowing and accounting gimmicks to cover deficits, which lead to larger deficits pushed out to the future.  Spending mandates like Prop. 98 haven’t even worked to protect school funding – we’ve become the worst state on spending K-12 under that mandate.  A clear set of rules that resists enshrining policy but allows policy to work unimpeded through a framework of government seems to be the best practice here.

Then there’s our failed experiment with direct democracy, which brought about many of the constrictions under which current government now labors, such as the crazy 2/3 requirements, which allow the majority to say that the minority blocks their wishes while allowing the minority to claim that they have no power because they’re in the minority.

What do I think a Constitutional convention needs to include?

• ending the 2/3 requirements and restoring democracy to the fiscal process over the tyranny of the minority, and returning decisions for spending and taxation to elected representatives

• two-year budget cycles and performance-based budgeting to try and engender a long-term approach

• indirect democracy, where the legislature can either work out the item on the ballot with proponents and pass it through their chamber, or amend items that reach the ballot.  In addition, we need a higher barrier for Constitutional amendments and changes to the process of signature gathering.

• any ballot-box budgeting must include a dedicated funding source – “paygo for initiatives”

• smaller legislative districts, either by expanding the Assembly or moving to a unicameral legislature with 150 or more members.

• elimination of the current term limits, the tighest in the nation, with more of a happy medium

• instant runoff voting for state legislative vacancies to speed the process of filling them

• local government gets the local resources they collect without them routing through Sacramento

Those are a few of the things I’d like to see addressed, and I’m sure people have additional ones.  The crisis we currently have in California presents an opportunity for new thinking about government and how to manage the largest state in the union and one of the largest economies in the world.  Despite the doom and gloom, California retains its vibrancy, its diversity, its abundance.  Only the structure under with it governs itself has failed, and that failure has seeped into everyday life.  Lifting that structure will be like lifting a heavy weight off the backs of the citizenry.  We can lead a path to a better future.

Related – Repair California

In the wake of the latest, but by no means the last, budget mess in California, I continue to believe that the only way to break the deeply negative cycle of fiscal dysfunction and budgetary gridlock is through a Constitutional convention that restores democracy and provides sensible, workable government in the state of California.  You’ll be interested to know that this belief actually transcends party lines.  Tom Karako directs the Golden State Center at the Claremont Institute, one of the nation’s most conservative think tanks.  And even he agrees that the state’s Constitution needs to change to better serve the public.  I haven’t previously seen a conception of what a conservative vision for a Constitutional convention would look like, and so I think it’s worth analyzing it to see their preferred options.  Karako first says:

If Californians do rewrite the Constitution, it should be revised to resemble more closely the concise federal Constitution: more responsible legislators and executives, stronger control of the bureaucracy and less direct democracy.

Then he comes up with several issues that appear nowhere in the federal Constitution.  Here are his six proposals:

1. Part-time Legislature

2. Hard spending cap

3. Two-year budgeting cycle

4. Eliminate the two-thirds supermajority requirement for budgets

5. Unified executive branch

6. Repeal ballot-box budgeting

The first four are either irrelevant to the federal Constitution or in direct conflict to federal Constitutional provisions.  But I will soldier on and take them in kind.

Karako clarifies that his vision of a “part-time legislature” would not be a citizen legislature, and would include the same salaries and responsibilities as today.  With all due respect, then, we already have this.  State legislative sessions, in theory, open in January and end on August 31, and there are numerous recesses in between those dates.  The only reason it seems lately like the legislature is always at work is because four extraordinary sessions have been called in the past year and a half to deal with the budget mess.  Our legislature works around six months out of the year in less extraordinary circumstances.  That sounds part-time to me.

This notion of a hard spending cap has been soundly rejected by the voters twice in the past four years.  It is certainly not a feature of the federal Constitution, and it does not take into account emergency spending needs, the outpacing of inflation over wages in areas like health care, and multiple other provisions.  States with spending caps have seen their quality of life suffer and their state rankings plummet (see TABOR in Colorado).  This would in my view be disastrous, and obviously it’s the major bone of contention between liberals and conservatives.

A two-year budget cycle actually sounds prudent to me.  I would supplement it with an advisory long-term budgeting benchmark that would bring the concept of long-term planning back into state government, but anything that looks beyond the horizon could improve the quality of state budgets.

Conservatives have begun to relent on the 2/3 rule for passing a state budget, while keeping in the requirement for taxes, for somewhat selfish reasons.  I agree that the current system eliminates accountability for both sides of the aisle, and letting the majority rule on these issues would allow the people to decide the results of that course of action.  But Karako doesn’t take this to the logical conclusion, that a budget is composed of taxes and spending, and that only with a full repeal of both of these 2/3 provisions would we have representative democracy in this state.  He wants to hold one party responsible for budgeting while tying their hands on how to go about instituting that budget.

After citing positively how other states have part-time legislatures, and negatively how only two other states require a 2/3 vote to pass a budget, Karako calls for a “unified executive branch” without mentioning that practically no other state has its Governor appoint all additional Constitutional officers.  Some states have Governors appoint certain various members, but not the entire slate.  This and the next idea show a typical conservative contempt for the will of the people.  Democracy, even direct democracy, is not the problem with California.  (This “unified executive branch” is also a cover for vesting greater authority in the executive to engage in, as Karako says, “firing and controlling non-elected bureaucrats and public employee unions,” or union-busting, in the vernacular.)

And that leads us to Karako’s idea to repeal all ballot-box budgeting, where he does not specify between different types of ballot-box budgeting.  Those measures with funding sources provide no strain on the budget process because they do not impact the General Fund.  Unfunded mandates do represent a problem, and reformers have devised a solution, essentially “paygo” for ballot initiatives, requiring that they include a funding source before presenting them to voters.  Karako, instead, wants to repeal all voter-approved measures and place them under the General Fund.  I also believe in the indirect initiative, allowing the legislature a crack at either passing a ballot measure themselves in consultation with the proponents, or changing the language with amendments to better reflect current priorities.

On one thing I agree with Karako; “California needs constitutional reform before we can expect sustained fiscal reform.”  I don’t think his ideas hold to his belief in drawing on the wisdom of the US Constitution; however, I do see some common ground, on two-year budget cycles, on the need for democratic rule, on initiative reform.  My belief is that a Constitutional convention could bring together the entire rich diversity of the state to discuss, debate and decide on these issues, coming to a decision that will improve representative government in the state.  I’ll see Mr. Karako there.

UPDATE by Robert: For a progressive vision of a constitutional convention, the Courage Campaign’s Citizens Plan to Reform California (CPR for California) is a good place to start. I plan to write more about it this week.