Too Much Democracy

It's another news story about us angry Californians and our wacky "democratic" initiative process. Ballot Issues Attest To Anger in California

From San Diego to Mount Shasta, voters are expressing mounting disgust over California’s fiscal meltdown and deteriorating services, and they are offering scores of voter initiatives that seek to change the way the state does business.

Over 30 such initiatives — among over 60 total initiatives so far — are now wending their way toward the ballot box. Every day, it seems another vexed voter adds a proposal to the fray.

Some verge on the radical, like one to establish the state’s first constitutional convention in over a century, to rewrite California’s most fundamental legislative rules. There are initiatives in circulation that would reduce the time the Legislature is in session, punish legislators for late budgets and criminalize “false statements about legislative acts.”

Other states, of course, are also suffering through red ink, but none have quite the same mechanism as California’s to let voters get involved with the process. Despite the fact that past initiatives helped get California into its budget crisis — forcing spending in some areas while limiting taxation in others — the pileup of new ones suggests that many voters still believe they hold the solution to the state’s mess. Few seem to believe that elected officials are up to the job.

The only initiative I would support would be an initiative to make it more difficult to put initiatives on the ballot. At this point, it's become just another special interest vehicle, and an exceedingly cheap one at that. One deep pocket donor can fund some petition gatherers, get something on the ballot, and then pay for a couple weeks of weepy "for the children"- style advertising. It's happened with everything from K-12 education funding to stem cell research to banning the sale of horse meat (a Robert Redford crusade from a few years back). Progressive Californian politicians love it too: legislators can put their own initiatives on the ballot and pass laws that they would never be able to get through the legislature; the $10 billion high speed rail bond being only the latest example.

Meanwhile, the only time initiatives are challenged or loudly objected to are those used to pass popular conservative laws whether on ending bi-lingual education, ending affirmative action in public university admissions, "banning" gay marriage, enabling three-strikes sentencing, establishing legislative term limits, and so on. Then, everyone starts talking about the tyranny of the majority, "angry voters," etc. It's a rigged game that has tied down California's budget in endless "voter approved" mandates and bloated its constitution to the point of incomprehension.

Having voters decide contentious issues on a direct up and down vote might make sense in a New England town hall or Gilligan's Island. But, we're talking about the most populous state in union, with an economy that is the eighth largest in the world. It's completely inappropriate. We don't need more direct democracy, we need a lot less. The problem is that our political class is no brighter than any other state-level politicians. Initiatives make it easy for them to punt on a vote, kick it out to an initiative, and hope no one reads the fine print (and there's plenty of fine print. many initiatives are as obtuse and legalistic as an Assembly bill).

Even now, there are apparently initiatives kicking around to re-draft the state constitution. This should properly be the subject of political leadership, not some amorphous "up from the People" fantasy. If a candidate for governor thinks this is a good idea, then let them make this an issue in their campaign. The people's role in such an endeavor should properly be voting for candidates, and then voting them out of office when they don't perform. If that doesn't work, there's always the options of mass street protest and armed insurrection (frankly, the only plausible scenarios that could lead to a new constitutional convention in the absence of political leadership). But, redrafting the state constitution through a state-wide ballot? Am I the only one in CA who thinks this is daft?

What CA really needs are voters who are engaged in the representative aspects of state government, and who hold their representatives to account; but that is the last thing people want to do. It's more fun to pass an initiative without considering its long term consequences, rather than pay attention to what is going on in Sacramento.