Peter Schrag has a column in the Bee that is an interesting comparison of Gov. Brown to President Obama:<\/p>\n
What is a little surprising is that Brown, surely aware of what the Republican minority in Congress did to Barack Obama in the first year of his presidency in 2009, would allow himself to be played in very much the same way.<\/p>\n
Yes, Brown is up against the constitutional requirement, enacted with Proposition 13 in 1978, that tax increases may be enacted only with two-thirds majorities in each house of the Legislature. He thus needs a couple of GOP votes in each house. But by now it should have been clear that all the talking with the five Senate “traitors” who’ve sat down with the governor was going nowhere.(SacBee<\/a>)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Really, from day 1, the Republicans haven’t been negotiating in good faith. They’ve been dragging their feet, trying to either get permission from their anti-government overlords (that wasn’t going to happen) or just delay long enough to make the people of California distrustful of any plan that comes out of Sacramento. In fact, Joe Nation sums this up well in an op-ed in the Chronicle:<\/p>\n
What is strange about the current debate is that it is not about taxes but about voter choice. Even more bizarre, it contradicts the state GOP’s position as stated on its website: “Republicans believe individuals should control both their own and their government’s pocketbook – the people should authorize all tax increases.”<\/p>\n
In short, the people should authorize all tax increases. We just shouldn’t give them the opportunity to authorize them.<\/p>\n
That convenient position may permit some lawmakers to avoid the political death penalty. But in its place, lawmakers are imposing a civic death penalty on voters, who no longer have a choice on the kind of California in which they choose to live.((SF Chronicle<\/a>)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The Republicans live in an ever-present state of terror with their base. Might this change with top-2 and the lack of a true primary? Well, perhaps but not likely. As we saw with the special election to replace Dave Cogdill in SD-01, there are few districts in California that a Democrat can’t at least come in second place. So, essentially you have a primary election, with one member of each major party advancing. Now, that isn’t true in a few Democratic districts, San Francisco and Alameda counties come to mind, and you might find a situation where two republicans advance here and there. But, fundamentally, it is doubtful all that much will change.<\/p>\n
So, we continue to negotiate with ourselves.<\/p>\n
On a related note, I was on KPFK’s Uprising Radio<\/a> to talk about the budget. You can find the audio of that interview here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Peter Schrag has a column in the Bee that is an interesting comparison of Gov. Brown to President Obama:<\/p>\n
What is a little surprising is that Brown, surely aware of what the Republican minority in Congress did to Barack Obama in the first year of his presidency in 2009, would allow himself to be played in very much the same way.<\/p>\n
Yes, Brown is up against the constitutional requirement, enacted with Proposition 13 in 1978, that tax increases may be enacted only with two-thirds majorities in each house of the Legislature. He thus needs a couple of GOP votes in each house. But by now it should have been clear that all the talking with the five Senate “traitors” who’ve sat down with the governor was going nowhere.(SacBee<\/a>)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Really, from day 1, the Republicans haven’t been negotiating in good faith. They’ve been dragging their feet, trying to either get permission from their anti-government overlords (that wasn’t going to happen) or just delay long enough to make the people of California distrustful of any plan that comes out of Sacramento. In fact, Joe Nation sums this up well in an op-ed in the Chronicle:<\/p>\n
What is strange about the current debate is that it is not about taxes but about voter choice. Even more bizarre, it contradicts the state GOP’s position as stated on its website: “Republicans believe individuals should control both their own and their government’s pocketbook – the people should authorize all tax increases.”<\/p>\n
In short, the people should authorize all tax increases. We just shouldn’t give them the opportunity to authorize them.<\/p>\n
That convenient position may permit some lawmakers to avoid the political death penalty. But in its place, lawmakers are imposing a civic death penalty on voters, who no longer have a choice on the kind of California in which they choose to live.((SF Chronicle<\/a>)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The Republicans live in an ever-present state of terror with their base. Might this change with top-2 and the lack of a true primary? Well, perhaps but not likely. As we saw with the special election to replace Dave Cogdill in SD-01, there are few districts in California that a Democrat can’t at least come in second place. So, essentially you have a primary election, with one member of each major party advancing. Now, that isn’t true in a few Democratic districts, San Francisco and Alameda counties come to mind, and you might find a situation where two republicans advance here and there. But, fundamentally, it is doubtful all that much will change.<\/p>\n
So, we continue to negotiate with ourselves.<\/p>\n
On a related note, I was on KPFK’s Uprising Radio<\/a> to talk about the budget. You can find the audio of that interview here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[117,204],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13324","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-117","category-204"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Pvhz-3sU","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13324","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13324"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13324\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13324"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13324"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13324"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}