CT Blue

The forces of reason are proposing a

ballot initiative

that will, one would hope, eventually bring an end to ballot initiatives in California:

In the coming weeks, the coalition Repair California will begin the official process of calling a state constitutional convention, submitting ballot-initiative language to Attorney General Jerry Brown’s office. Repair California proposes to restructure government through a state constitutional convention.

California has become the laughingstock of the nation and, to some extent, the world, because of how dysfunctional our government is. But it’s not a laughing matter for the people who live here, and we, in a couple of short decades, descended from having the best education system in the country to having one of the worst. We have the worst traffic in the country. We have a water crisis, a prison crisis, a budget crisis. Pretty much everywhere you look at state government, we have a crisis. And so it’s time for a big fix. And it’s time to fix the system itself. And the way to do that is through a constitutional convention.

As the article points out, it is not hard to fix the moment at which the crisis was conceived.

California’s governance problems, however, reach back decades; ever since 1978, Proposition 13 has capped property taxes. The fiscal situation is made even more dysfunctional by the requirement that two-thirds of the state Legislature approve any budget, giving the Republican minority disproportionate power.

In a word, California got fucked by the right wing in 1978 (and several more times in subsequent years) and the offspring of that union has turned out to be a monster.

This movement appears to have a reasonably good chance to succeed, although it will be opposed by the usual right wing suspects. Grover Norquist famously said that After all, California has come the closest in the country (excluding some Southern states, which don’t count) to draining down Grover Norquist’s bathtub, and they will certainly not want to give up when the goal of total destruction of the state is so close. But societies sometimes pull themselves from the brink, and we can only hope that California does so.

It’s a given that the new constitution, to succeed, must abolish the current system of referenda and initiative, which have made the state ungovernable. What will be interesting is whether California will take this opportunity to redefine what should be considered basic human rights in the 21st century. A lot as changed since 1789. Will California take this opportunity to explicitly protect privacy rights, for instance. We’ll see.