Yesterday’s Constitutional Convention Summit was actually an autopsy. For five hours both panelists and the audience dissected the reasons for the death of the California Dream and all agreed, even if they did not explicitly say this (though many more did than I ever expected), that California’s government was murdered by Prop 13 and its accomplices. A Legislature that in the late 1960s was rated as the nation’s best has now become one of the most unpopular and ineffective institutions in American politics.
What the Summit revealed is that at the core of California’s political crisis is that the people of this state have no way to hold anyone accountable for a system that has totally and deliberately failed. By completely eviscerating the method by which public services are financed, and by locking into place a conservative veto over state government, Prop 13 and the 2/3 rule in particular ensured that the Legislature would never be able to enact effective policy again. And that to produce solutions, voters would have to fill the Legislature with Democrats, something that isn’t possible given our self-segregating electorate.
The Chronicle’s John Wildermuth also noticed the centrality of the 2/3 rule to the discussions, and several folks, including Mark Paul of the New America Foundation emphasized how pathologically dysfunctional it has made our government.
It would be very wrong to say that the supporters of a convention in that room were solely motivated by the wreckage of 1978. Many attendees wanted to focus on the need to increase popular engagement with government. Proportional representation and smaller legislative districts (i.e. more legislators) were common proposals. Steven Hill of New America Foundation in particular has had some good ideas on reforming our democracy – you can find some of them on their Political Reform Blog.
But more important was the spirit of popular engagement that suffused almost every panelist’s comments. There was a recognition that if our state is to be fixed, and if a convention is the way it’s going to be done, the people themselves really do have to be empowered. A convention, and their government, have to be made relevant to the lived experience of Californians. They have to trust that they can control a convention, and that its outcomes will make their lives better.
Much more over the flip.
The lone conservative Republican who agreed to attend as a panelist, Michael Capaldi of the Orange County Lincoln Club, spent his time proving that the Zombie Death Cult literally has nothing to offer California other than the status quo. He kept talking about what “fiscal conservatives” want, as if anyone is still fooled by them. They had the run of the state for the last 30 years. Until last week the last time the Legislature agreed to a tax increase was 1992. They’ve had the governor’s office 22 out of the last 30 years.
The Zombie Death Cult, as witnessed by Bobby Jindal’s ridiculous joke of a speech, is particularly unaccountable. They use the 2/3 rule to shape policy, and then blame the result on the majority party, while they become more and more doctrinaire and cult-like. Hence their name – they’re a cult (deviance from the truth is not tolerated), they are producing death (that of the state and its residents) and they’re zombies (a political party that hasn’t had a hope of winning elections in this state since the mid-1990s, but somehow walks among the living).
Capaldi did, however, understand what was up. He said “fiscal conservatives have the most to lose from a convention” and this is of course true. The entire reason people are speaking of calling a convention is to fix what he and his ideological allies broke. The reason we need to make a convention and government relevant again to the people and their lives is because he helped make government irrelevant and in fact unable to help improve their lives.
Capaldi also made some revealing comments about public service – namely, he thinks it’s for saps. His attacks on elected officials motivated one woman, a former mayor of Morgan Hill, to rise in defense of local electeds. She pointed out that she had been one of the few women elected to local government, was there to speak for working mothers, and that she took it seriously and as a point of pride when constituents would talk to her about issues in the supermarket, or on the soccer field, or wherever else. Capaldi’s attitude is one of a man who has tried to destroy the ability of a community to improve itself, and to denigrate those who try to make things better through government.
I spend time on him to illustrate what is the second key outcome of the Summit – a de facto recognition that the right-wing no longer has a place in California politics. I may be quicker to see this than others in the room, but it’s true. The convention, and state politics in general, are becoming the domain of the center and the left.
The same thing is revealing itself in Washington DC. In federal and state politics the only thing keeping the right-wing relevant are supermajority procedural rules – the Senate filibuster and the 2/3 rule (although a media that has been trained to parrot whatever a Republican says has a role too, but the media is either dying or about to be rudely awakened by massive public support for Obama and his agenda).
For the last 30 years the center has seen the left as their primary threat, and seen the right as either useful idiots or desirable allies. I believe this is starting to change, as some in the center are starting to see the right as their primary threat and the left as either useful idiots or desirable allies. (As someone firmly on the left, I don’t take offense, since I’m not all that worried about the center dominating things anyway. They’re going to struggle to remain relevant too.)
Interestingly, the center and the left can work together because they both agree on something fundamental: good government is essential to social happiness and prosperity. The right-wing rejects all of that. But because Californians now demand good government to help solve this dire economic crisis, the right-wing is effectively cutting itself out of the conversation. Whether it’s Jindal attacking the notion of unemployment insurance or Zed Hollingsworth attacking the notion of funding public schools, the result is the same: marginalization and irrelevance.
Whether in a constitutional convention or state politics as a whole, debates between center and left are going to become of prime importance. On a convention, for example, a question is whether the convention should be limited or broad in scope. Most progressives don’t want the convention to address social issues. But many of us would like to use it as an opportunity to dramatically reshape the relationship of government and the people – and ideally to tear down those divides. Perhaps a unicameral legislature with 300 representatives, some picked by proportional representation. The center would want a more narrowly focused convention whose brief is confined to some structural fixes but that don’t really reshape how California’s democracy works.
Another potential divide is delegate selection. Most progressive organizations want to throw the doors open to the people, to allow them to elect their representatives – as many as 15-20 per district. Some centrist groups, like the League of Women Voters, seem to prefer an indirect method, where a Prop 11-style commission would pick through some arcane formula designed to produce a more neutral (but perhaps less accountable) set of delegates.
There will be other debates, and I know I’ve only scratched the surface of the specific proposals. And that’s partly deliberate. As several folks who spoke yesterday recognized, if this is to work it really must provide the people with meaningful and genuine empowerment. It has to be their convention. The people are, after all, sovereign. We can and should offer suggestions and ideas, but this can’t be a top-down affair. Of course, I’m happy to discuss specific ideas in the comments.
If you’ll forgive me, I want to close with a very good quote on this from my boss at the Courage Campaign, Rick Jacobs, who told the crowd:
What we have is so broken that I can’t even imagine that we get something worse…If we ever get to the point where there is a constitutional convention, I think it ought to be big, it ought to be broad, and we ought to trust the people.
Not surprisingly I agree, and I hope you all do as well. The next moves on this have to be a big and broad public conversation where we go directly to the people and say “we trust you to fix this state. what do you want to do, and how would you do it?”