Some interesting ideas in today’s Fish Wrapper about changing the way initiatives are handled in California. I tend to agree that initiatives are abused in the form of too frequently doing an end run around the legislative process.* In theory.
In practice, the Democrats have dominated the Legislature since 1970 — except for about ten months in 1995-1996 when Republicans eked out a bare majority in the Assembly but not the Senate, but still were thwarted for day-to-day control of that body by outgoing Speaker Willie Brown, who managed to keep functional control of the Assembly despite having a one-vote minority under his leadership. Democrats can effectively bottleneck any Republican legislation they don’t like, regardless of its wisdom or popularity. The wonder of it is that any Republican ideas get enacted into law at all.
Simply put, the Democrats who have been in charge of the Legislature all this time have proven themselves to be (as a group) corrupt, incompetent, craven, and uninterested in advancing the public benefit. So the initiative process is one of the few ways that are available to Republicans to realistically advance some of their more bold ideas, and that was the purpose of having initiatives in the first place. And no Governor since Pete Wilson has proven up to the task of standing up to this massively powerful Democratic political machine that is seemingly hell-bent on running the state into the ground — and Wilson didn’t always win his battles with them, either.
With that said, I really think that it should be difficult to amend the California Constitution. It is simply too easy to do it now — all it takes is enough money to fund a signature-gathering drive and then a majority vote at the next election. I would be in favor of the idea of enacting a supermajority requirement to amend the state’s Constitution — despite the difficulty that would place on overturning Proposition 8, because the Constitution should be important and not tampered with lightly. Matters such as when commercial fishermen can use purse-seine nets to harvest tuna (Article X-B, the Marine Resources Protection Act of 1990) and allocation of funding based on revenues generated from motor vehicle registration and gas taxes (Article XIX) should really be left to the Legislature so as to allow it to respond to the ebb and flow of political and economic developments, and not decided by the Constitution.
It’s a terrible thing that this Legislature has proven itself incompetent to handle the task of governing the state, but that is where the ultimate responsibility should rest. There is a reason that we elect people who are supposed to become experts on policy to enact laws for us. Our failure as voters is to have chosen such a collection of boobs to that task. And given that as voters, we can’t pick decent people to run the state, why should we think we’d be any better at it ourselves?
* I’m trying, very hard, to think of initiatives in general, rather than specifically about Proposition 8.
