The Complete Unknown

Making sense of California since 1980

The path not taken

Below is the editorial I wrote for the Sacramento Bee a few days after 9/11. I'll let you decide how well we rose to the moment.

A new politics

History seizes the nation's agenda 

The terrorist attacks that smashed the World Trade Center towers in New York toppled an era of American politics, too. 

Only days ago the White House was gearing up a fall offensive to talk about "values." Public discourse in this country (or what passed for it) was obsessed with sex between a congressman and a missing intern. Today, all that seems staggeringly off point. Higher unemployment numbers announced a week ago rang alarm bells warning that the economic slowdown might turn out to be something longer and more serious. And now the attacks in New York and Washington have brought the terrorist war against America home. 

When peace and prosperity ruled, Americans didn't much notice or care that national politics had been reduced to the scale of an HO train set. Presidents worried about school uniforms and whether movies and television were suitable for young eyes. They perched on tiny chairs as they read to school children, providing set pieces for the TV cameras, as if they wanted to be school-superintendent-in-chief. Every week the White House had a theme, carefully poll-tested, and its opponents on Capitol Hill had their counter-theme, equally poll-driven. 

From where the country stands now, much of that looks like a luxury and indulgence. Forget the theme of the week; history has seized the national agenda. Like the schools and their students, politics and politicians now must be measured against stiffer standards. Will we have boom or bust, peace or war, security or vulnerability?

The days ahead are a leadership test especially for President Bush. He has skated lightly through the early months of his term. His economic policy consisted of little but a tax cut for the rich. The medicine he first prescribed in 1999 at the height of the boom he stills touts now as the antidote for slowdown; it's the all-purpose elixir. Before the attack last week, he had offered no comprehensive elaboration of his foreign policy, either to explain to the country his view of the world or his strategy for dealing with it. None of that is adequate anymore. 

The Democrats face their own challenge. The national party lacks a leader or a dominant voice, and its congressional leaders have been more willing to point up Bush's shortcomings than offer an alternative vision. The country must be united, without regard to party, on the goals of reviving the economy and defeating the terrorist threat. However, as throughout our history, it needs the party out of power to assure a full debate on the means to reach those goals.

Many Americans took peace and prosperity as license to ignore the rest of the world. Some pretended that the choices made in politics didn't matter to their own lives. Those easy beliefs got buried Tuesday in rubble of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. 

The world we ignored harbors forces hostile to our very existence as a society and ready to commit unthinkable acts to harm us. Our safety will hinge on the choices made in politics, by both leaders and citizens, and on our ability to hold together as a national community that puts the greater good ahead of self interest, personal convenience and prejudice. We citizens are being tested, too, and last week taught us the price of failing. 

 

--Sacramento Bee, Sept. 16, 2001

 

 

California is not out of the woods

If you think the budget deal put California's troubles behind us, think again. 

As Controller John Chiang explains in this interview with Greg Lucas, the state cash crunch will likely return in July, at the beginning of the next fiscal year. And with the economy continuing to deteriorate, the state's cash problem could turn out to be even larger than now anticipated. The people of California and other states are going to pay a big price for Senator Susan Collins and Ben Nelson's "moderation" in scaling down assistance to the states in the stimulus bill. As Barry Goldwater might have said, moderation in the pursuit of economic recovery is no virtue.

The Call of a Constitutional Convention | New America Blogs

The Call of a Constitutional Convention

Mark Paul - 
March 3, 2009 - 6:57pm

My old friend Bill Cavala has metamorphosed into such a creature of the Legislature –– “a veteran of over 30 years in Sacramento,” his blog taxonomy trumpets –– that the only explanation he can muster for those who believe Californians can bypass the Capitol to call a constitutional convention is that the reformers are “slow.”

It’s an odd charge coming from someone 98 years behind the times.

According to Cavala, the only legal path to a convention leads through the Legislature. Against all the lawyers who have opined that voters can give themselves the authority to put a convention call on the ballot, a power currently reserved to the Legislature, Cavala offers up the uncited authority of Joe Remcho, the famous political lawyer. Remcho, alas, is no longer around to tell us that approach would be struck down by the California Supreme Court as an impermissible “revision” of the constitution.

Not being a lawyer, I won’t join Cavala in making firm predictions about how the court would rule on that question. But as a historian and a long-time watcher of California politics and law, I do feel comfortable pointing out that, when the voters have horned in on the Legislature’s powers, the courts have almost always looked the other way.

It started, of course, in 1911, when voters approved the initiative, referendum, and recall. They amended the constitution to reserve “to themselves the power to propose laws and amendments to the constitution, and to adopt or reject the same, at the polls independent of the legislature.” Though they graciously bowed in the direction of the Legislature, vesting in it “the legislative power of this state,” they left no doubt who wears the pants in this family. The 1911 measure specified that, henceforth, the enacting clause of every law would read: “The people of the State of California do enact as follows.”

Talk about your revision of the constitution. As Sen. Leroy Wright wrote in opposition to the measure in the 1911 ballot pamphlet, “it is so radical as to be almost revolutionary in its character. Its tendency is to change the republican form of our government and head it towards democracy…” But the California courts did not balk at this far-reaching revision (and reduction) of the Legislature’s role as the central law-making body of the state. (Perhaps they had their eyes on another measure on that 1911 ballot, passed by a far larger margin, which authorized voter recall of judges.)

And so it has gone for the last century. Time and again the voters have hacked away at the Legislature’s once-central constitutional role: limiting lawmakers’ terms; taking away their power to set their own salaries; capping the size of the Legislature’s budget; imposing supermajority vote requirements in the Legislature for spending and tax increase bills; specifying how money lawmakers must budget for schools and other programs.

And time and again the courts have stood aside. Only once, in 1984, in a pre-election challenge, did the California Supreme Court block an initiative impinging upon the Legislature as an illegal revision of the constitution. That measure would have required the Legislature to pass a resolution calling on Congress to pass a federal balanced budget amendment. The legal rule seems to be that the people can pretty much do what they like to the legislative branch except put words into its mouth.

Right now, the path to a new state constitution has six steps:

1) The Legislature puts the question to voters whether they want to call a convention.

2) The people approve it.

3) The Legislature provides for electing delegates to the convention.

4) The people elect the delegates.

5) The delegates debate and draft a revised constitution to put on the ballot.

6) The people vote it up or down.

It’s possible the court would rule that allowing the people to put the question to themselves in Step 1 of a process that the people dominate would amount to “a substantial alteration of the entire Constitution,” the court’s definition of a revision. But how likely?

“All political power is inherent in the people…,” the state constitution says, “and they have the right to alter or reform” their government “when the public good may require.” Perhaps there are four justices on the court who will look at that language and then rule that the people have all political power to reform their government but only if the Legislature agrees to let them do it.

I may be “slow,” but given the court’s hundred-year-long record of letting voters shrink the Legislature’s constitutional role, it doesn’t seem to me the smartest way to bet.

via newamerica.net

Taking the politics out of title and summary | New America Blogs

Taking the politics out of title and summary

Mark Paul - 
March 5, 2009 - 6:01pm

Joe Mathews is right: the way California lets politicians, whether the attorney general or the Legislature, put their thumbs on the scale by writing cagey or misleading titles and summaries for ballot measures invites dishonesty and abuse, as with Proposition 1A on the May special election ballot.The state needs an independent ballot title process carried out, as he says, by non-politicians.

Here’s how it might work:

When a measure for the ballot is submitted to the state, the secretary of state would ask the Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) to prepare a list of up to ten multiple-choice questions about its major provisions and effects.

She would then send a staff member to a randomly selected place in the state. The staffer would offer $1,000 apiece to the first three registered voters he meets on the street if they would agree to sit together and write the title and summary of the measure. They would have one hour to read the measure and write a title and summary. All three would have to agree on the wording. If they could not perform that task by consensus, the measure would be returned to the proponent for rewriting.

Once the panel of non-politicians had produced the title and summary, the secretary of state would send a staff member to another randomly selected place in the state. The staffer would offer $1,000 apiece to the first three registered voters he meets on the street if they would agree to read the title and summary and then answer the questions prepared by the LAO. If all three correctly answer 80 percent of the questions, the measure would go onto the ballot; otherwise it would be returned to the proponent.

The result? Politically independent titles and summaries. Only ballot measures voters actually understand. And even an opportunity to make some money for the state, by selling the rights to film those titling sessions to a reality TV producer: “Watch ordinary people struggle to make sense out of confusion in an exotic locale! Tonight, on Survivor: California.”

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via newamerica.net